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Updated: June 17, 2025
The survivors will be humbled, and will be more obedient to a whisper of your Grace's pleasure than their fathers, or the knaves that now exist, have, been to your strictest commands." "This is wise but ungodly counsel," said the prior, shaking his head; "I cannot take it upon my conscience to recommend it. It is wisdom, but it is the wisdom of Achitophel, crafty at once and cruel."
Charles was the Hebrew king, Monmouth was Absalom, Shaftesbury was the wily Achitophel who drew him into revolt. The "Absalom" was a satire, and it was the first great English satire, for the satires of Marston and Hall were already forgotten. It is in ages indeed like the Restoration that satire naturally comes to the front.
"Walk sober off, before a sprightlier age Come tittering on, and shove you from the stage." "Hence to repose your trust in me was wise." DRYDEN'S /Absalom and Achitophel/. MR. FREDERICK CLEVELAND, a younger son of the Earl of Byrneham, and therefore entitled to the style and distinction of "Honourable," was the guardian of Ernest Maltravers.
He wrote the bulk of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel with a wonderfully close imitation of Dryden's manner, besides several dramatic pieces and poems. Between Tate, Shadwell, Eusden, and Pye lies the unenviable distinction of being the worst of the laureates of England.
Boileau knew just as little about the Paradise Lost, and about Absalom and Achitophel; but he had read Addison's Latin poems, and admired them greatly. They had given him, he said, quite a new notion of the state of learning and taste among the English. Johnson will have it that these praises were insincere.
"I read Milton's Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden's Holy Grail, and many other poems, but I'm not sure of their titles after all these years." Nalini suspected that his friend's English lore was somewhat rusty. In order to test him further, he asked, "Can you tell me who wrote 'Life is real, life is earnest, that line applies to you!" Pulin fidgeted about before answering.
In Absalom and Achitophel he hit upon a new and rich vein, which he worked with signal success. They ancient satirists were the subjects of a despotic government. They were compelled to abstain from political topics, and to confine their attention to the frailties of private life. They might, indeed, sometimes venture to take liberties with public men,
Take Dryden's Achitophel and Zimri; every line adds to or modifies the character, which is, as it were, a-building up to the very last verse; whereas in Pope's Timon, &c. the first two or three couplets contain all the pith of the character, and the twenty or thirty lines that follow are so much evidence or proof of overt acts of jealousy, or pride, or whatever it may be that is satirized."
The literary merits of the satire, when we compare it with the powerful verse of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, to which he refers in the exordium, are not great. Defoe prided himself upon his verse, and in a catalogue of the Poets in one of his later pieces assigned himself the special province of "lampoon."
Though Buckingham is forgotten and Shaftesbury's name swallowed up in that of his more philanthropic descendant, we can read of Achitophel and Zimri still, and feel something of the strength and heat which he caught from a fiercely fought conflict and transmitted with his own gravity and purposefulness into verse.
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