The success of this wonderful satire was so great, that the court had again recourse to the assistance of its author.  Shaftesbury was now liberated from the Tower; for the grand jury, partly influenced by deficiency of proof, and partly by the principles of the Whig party, out of which the sheriffs had carefully selected them, refused to find the bill of high treason against him.  This was a subject of unbounded triumph to his adherents, who celebrated his acquittal by the most public marks of rejoicing.  Amongst others, a medal was struck, bearing the head and name of Shaftesbury, and on the reverse, a sun, obscured with a cloud, rising over the Tower and city of London, with the date of the refusal of the bill (24th November 1681), and the motto LAETAMUR.  These medals, which his partisans wore ostentatiously at their bosoms, excited the general indignation of the Tories; and the king himself is said to have suggested it as a theme for the satirical muse of Dryden, and to have rewarded his performance with an hundred broad pieces.  To a poet of less fertility, the royal command, to write again upon a character which, in a former satire, he had drawn with so much precision and felicity, might have been as embarrassing at least as honourable.  But Dryden was inexhaustible; and easily discovered, that, though he had given the outline of Shaftesbury in “Absalom and Achitophel,” the finished colouring might merit another canvas.  About the sixteenth of March 1681, he published, anonymously “The Medal, a Satire against Sedition,” with the apt motto,

  “Per Graium populos, mediaeque per Elidis urbem
  Ibat ovans; Divumque sibi poscebat honores.”

In this satire, Shaftesbury’s history; his frequent political apostasies; his licentious course of life, so contrary to the stern rigour of the fanatics, with whom he had associated; his arts in instigating the fury of the anti-monarchists; in fine, all the political and moral bearings of his character sounded and exposed to contempt and reprobation, the beauty of the poetry adding grace to the severity of the satire.  What impression these vigorous and well-aimed darts made upon Shaftesbury, who was so capable of estimating their sharpness and force, we have no means to ascertain; but long afterwards, his grandson, the author of the “Characteristics,” speaks of Dryden and his works with a bitter affectation of contempt, offensive to every reader of judgment, and obviously formed on prejudice against the man, rather than dislike to the poetry.[8] It is said, that he felt more resentment on account of the character of imbecility adjudged to his father in “Absalom and Achitophel,” than for all the pungent satire, there and in the “Medal,” bestowed upon his grandfather; an additional proof, how much more easy it is to bear those reflections which render ourselves or our friends hateful, than those by which they are only made ridiculous and contemptible.  The Whig poets, for many assumed that title, did not