Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
  For here’s a tun of midnight work to come,
  Og, from a treason-tavern rolling home;
  Round as a globe, and liquored every chink,
  Goodly and great he sails behind his link. 
  With all his bulk, there’s nothing lost in Og,
  For every inch that is not fool is rogue ....

  The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull
  With this prophetic blessing, Be thou dull! 
  Drink, swear, and roar, forbear no lewd delight
  Fit for thy bulk; do anything but write. 
  Eat opium, mingle arsenic in thy drink,
  Still thou mayst live, avoiding pen and ink. 
  I see, I see, ’tis counsel given in vain;
  For treason botched in rhyme will be thy bane ....

  A double noose thou on thy neck dost pull,
  For writing treason, and for writing dull...

  I will not rake the dunghill of thy crimes,
  For who would read thy life who reads thy rhymes? 
  But of King David’s foes be this the doom,
  May all be like the young man Absalom! 
  And for my foes, may this their blessing be,
  To talk like Doeg, and to write like thee!

Of the multitudinous rejoinders and counterblasts provoked by this thunder, Dryden, it is supposed, ascribed the authorship of one of the keenest to Shadwell.  We are to conceive some new and immediate provocation as added to the old grudge, to call for a second attack so soon; for it was only a month later that the “MacFlecknoe” appeared; not in 1689, as Dr. Johnson states, who, mistaking the date, also errs in assuming the cause of Dryden’s wrath to have been the transfer of the laurel from his own to the brows of Shadwell.  “MacFlecknoe” is by common consent the most perfect and perfectly acrid satire in English literature.  The topics selected, the foibles attacked, the ingenious and remorseless ridicule with which they are overwhelmed, the comprehensive vindictiveness which converted every personal characteristic into an instrument for the more refined torment of the unhappy victim, conjoin to constitute a masterpiece of this lower form of poetical composition;—­poetry it is not.  While Flecknoe’s pretensions as a dramatist were fairly a subject of derision, Shadwell was eminently popular.  He was a pretender to learning, and, entertaining with Dryden strong convictions of the reality of a literary metempsychosis, believed himself the heir of Jonson’s genius and erudition.  The title of the satire was, therefore, of itself a biting sarcasm.  His claims to sonship were transferred from Jonson, then held the first of dramatic writers, to Flecknoe, the last and meanest; and to aggravate the insult, the “Mac” was inserted as an irritating allusion to the alleged Irish origin of both,—­an allusion, however harmless and senseless now, vastly significant at that era of Irish degradation.  Of the immediate effect of this scarification upon Shadwell we have no information; how it ultimately affected his fortunes we shall see presently.