This translation was to be the last service which Dryden was to render his good-humoured, selfish, and thoughtless patron.  While the laureate was preparing for the stage the opera of “Albion and Albanius,” intended to solemnise the triumph of Charles over the Whigs, or, as the author expressed it, the double restoration of his sacred Majesty, the king died of an apoplexy upon the 6th February 1684-5.  His death opened to many, and to Dryden among others, new hopes, and new prospects, which were, in his instance, doomed to terminate in disappointment and disgrace.  We may therefore pause, and review the private life of the poet during the period which has occupied our last Sections.

The vigour and rapidity with which Dryden poured forth his animated satire, plainly intimates, that his mind was pleased with the exercise of that formidable power.  It was more easy for him, he has himself told us, to write with severity, than with forbearance; and indeed, where is the expert swordsman, who does not delight in the flourish of his weapon?  Neither could this self-complacent feeling be much allayed, by the vague and abusive ribaldry with which his satire was repaid.  This was natural to the controversy, was no more than he expected and was easily retorted with terrible interest.  “As for knave,” says he, “and sycophant and rascal, and impudent, and devil, and old serpent, and a thousand such good morrows, I take them to be only names of parties; and could return murderer, and cheat, and whig-napper, and sodomite; and, in short, the goodly number of the seven deadly sins, with all their kindred and relations, which are names of parties too; but saints will be saints in spite of villainy.”  With such feelings, we may believe Dryden’s rest was little disturbed by the litter of libels against him:—­

  “Sons of a day just buoyant on the flood,
  Then numbered with the puppies in the mud.”

But he who keenly engages in political controversy must not only encounter the vulgar abuse, which he may justly contemn, but the altered eye of friends, whose regard is chilled, or alienated.  That Dryden sustained such misfortune we cannot doubt, when he informs us, that, out of the large party in opposition, comprehending, doubtless, many men of talent and eminence, who were formerly familiar with him, he had, during the course of a whole year, only spoken to four, and to those but casually and cursorily, and only to express a wish, that the times might come when the names of Whig and Tory might be abolished, and men live together as they had done before they were introduced.