poem; although he is there charged with the most gross and infamous crimes.  Shadwell also seems to have had a share in a lampoon, entitled “The Tory Poets,” in which both Dryden and Otway were grossly reviled.[21] On both occasions, his satire was as clumsy as his overgrown person, and as brutally coarse as his conversation:  for Shadwell resembled Ben Jonson in his vulgar and intemperate pleasures, as well as in his style of comedy and corpulence of body.[22] Dryden seems to have thought, that such reiterated attacks, from a contemporary of some eminence, whom he had once called friend, merited a more severe castigation than could be administered in a general satire.  He therefore composed “Mac-Flecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S., by the Author of Absalom and Achitophel,” which was published 4th October 1682.  Richard Flecknoe, from whom the piece takes its title, was so distinguished as a wretched poet, that his name had become almost proverbial.  Shadwell is represented as the adopted son of this venerable monarch, who so long

  “In prose and verse was owned without dispute,
  Through all the realms of Nonsense absolute.”

The solemn inauguration of Shadwell as his successor in this drowsy kingdom, forms the plan of the poem; being the same which Pope afterwards adopted on a broader canvas for his “Dunciad.”  The vices and follies of Shadwell are not concealed, while the awkwardness of his pretensions to poetical fame are held up to the keenest ridicule.  In an evil hour, leaving the composition of low comedy, in which he held an honourable station, he adventured upon the composition of operas and pastorals.  On these the satirist falls without mercy; and ridicules, at the same time, his pretensions to copy Ben Jonson: 

  “Nor let false friends seduce thy mind to fame,
  By arrogating Jonson’s hostile name;
  Let father Flecknoe fire thy mind with praise,
  And uncle Ogleby thy envy raise. 
  Thou art my blood, where Jonson has no part: 
  What share have we in nature or in art? 
  Where did his wit on learning fix a brand,
  And rail at arts he did not understand? 
  Where made he love in Prince Nicander’s vein,
  Or swept the dust in Psyche’s humble strain?”

This unmerciful satire was sold off in a very short time; and it seems uncertain whether it was again published until 1084, when it appeared with the author’s name in Tonson’s first Miscellany.  It would seem that Dryden did not at first avow it, though, as the title-page assigned it to the author of “Absalom and Achitophel,” we cannot believe Shadwell’s assertion, that he had denied it with oaths and imprecations.  Dryden, however, omits this satire in the [first [23]] printed list of his plays and poems, along with the Eulogy on Cromwell.  But he was so far from disowning it, that, in his “Essay on Satire,” he quotes “Mac-Flecknoe” as an instance given by himself of the Varronian satire.  Poor Shadwell