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154 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
And Fortune’s Ice prefers to Virtue’s Land:
Achitophel, grown weary to possess
A lawful Fame, and lazy Happiness;
Disdain’d the Golden fruit to gather free,
And lent the Crowd his Arm to shake the Tree.
(Absalom and Achitophel)
The Medal (1682) follows on from Absalom and Achitophel, and predicts
much of the religious and political upheaval which was to come in
the next few years.
This kind of political satire, in the hands of later writers of novels
and plays like Delarivier Manley and Henry Fielding, became less and
less acceptable to the people who were its victims. The result would
be political censorship of the theatre, and a refining of satirical content
into highly political satires used as upper-class entertainment in some
of the writings of Alexander Pope who, with Dryden, is the main
figure in Augustan poetry.
Dryden was a highly prolific literary figure, a professional writer who
was at the centre of all the greatest debates of his time: the end of the
Commonwealth, the return of the monarch, the political and religious
upheavals of the 1680s, and the specifically literary questions of
neoclassicism opposed to more modern trends. He was Poet Laureate
from 1668, but lost this position in 1688 on the overthrow of James II.
Dryden had become Catholic in 1685, and his allegorical poem The Hind
and the Panther (1687) discusses the complex issues of religion and
politics in an attempt to reconcile bitterly opposed factions. This contains
a well-known line which anticipates Wordsworth more than a century
later: ‘By education most have been misled . . . / And thus the child
imposes on the man.’ The poem shows an awareness of change as one
grows older, and the impossibility of holding one view for a lifetime:
My thoughtless youth was winged with vain desires,
My manhood, long misled by wandering fires,
Followed false lights. . . .
After 1688, Dryden returned to the theatre, which had given him
many of his early successes in tragedy, tragi-comedy, and comedy, as
well as with adaptations of Shakespeare. His final plays are among