behold these attacks upon their leader and party with patience or forbearance; but they rushed to the combat with more zeal, or rather fury, than talent or policy.  Their efforts are numbered and described elsewhere;[9] so that we need here only slightly notice those which Dryden thought worthy of his own animadversion.  Most of them adopted the clumsy and obvious expedient of writing their answers in the style of the successful satire which had provoked them.  Thus, in reply to “Absalom and Achitophel,” Pordage and Settle imitated the plan of bestowing scriptural names on their poem and characters the former entitling his piece “Azaria and Hushai,” the latter, “Absalom Senior, or Absalom and Achitophel transposed.”  But these attempts to hurl back the satire at him by whom it was first launched, succeeded but indifferently, and might have convinced the authors that the charm of “Absalom and Achitophel” lay not in the plan, but in the power of execution.  It was easy to give Jewish titles to their heroes, but the difficulty lay in drawing their characters with the force and precision of their prototype.  Buckingham himself was rash enough to engage in this conflict; but, whether his anger blunted his wit, or that his share in the “Rehearsal” was less even than what is generally supposed, he loses, by his “Reflections on Absalom and Achitophel,” the credit we are disposed to allow him for talent on the score of that lively piece.[10] A nonconformist clergyman published two pieces, which I have never seen, one entitled, “A Whip for the Fool’s Back, who styles honourable Marriage a cursed confinement, in his profane Poem of Absalom and Achitophel;” the other, “A Key, with the Whip, to open the Mystery and Iniquity of the Poem called Absalom and Achitophel.”  Little was to be hoped or feared from poems bearing such absurd titles:  I throw, however, into the note, the specimen which Mr. Malone has given of their contents.[11] The reverend gentleman having announced, that Achitophel, in Hebrew, means “the brother of a fool,” Dryden retorted, with infinite coolness, that in that case the author of the discovery might pass with his readers for next akin, and that it was probably the relation which made the kindness.

“The Medal” was answered by the same authors who replied to “Absalom and Achitophel,” as if the Whigs had taken in sober earnest the advice which Dryden bestowed on them in the preface to that satire.  And moreover (as he there expressly recommends) they railed at him abundantly, without a glimmering of wit to enliven their scurrility.  Hickeringill, a crazy fanatic, began the attack with a sort of mad poem, called “The Mushroom.”  It was written and sent to press the very day on which “The Medal” appeared; a circumstance on which the author valued himself so highly, as to ascribe it to divine inspiration.[12] With more labour, and equal issue, Samuel Pordage, a minor poet of the day, produced “The Medal Reversed;” for which, and his former aggression, Dryden brands him, in a single line of the Second Part of “Absalom and Achitophel,” as