marks for the vengeance of the public.  As often as he is charged with one treason, his advocates vindicate him by confessing two.  They had better leave him where they find him.  For him there is no escape upwards.  Every outlet by which he can creep out of his present position, is one which lets him down into a still lower and fouler depth of infamy.  To whitewash an Ethiopian is a proverbially hopeless attempt; but to whitewash an Ethiopian by giving him a new coat of blacking is an enterprise more extraordinary still.  That in the course of Shaftesbury’s dishonest and revengeful opposition to the Court he rendered one or two most useful services to his country we admit.  And he is, we think, fairly entitled, if that be any glory, to have his name eternally associated with the Habeas Corpus Act in the same way in which the name of Henry the Eighth is associated with the reformation of the Church, and that of Jack Wilkes with the most sacred rights of electors.

While Shaftesbury was still living, his character was elaborately drawn by two of the greatest writers of the age, by Butler, with characteristic brilliancy of wit, by Dryden, with even more than characteristic energy and loftiness, by both with all the inspiration of hatred.  The sparkling illustrations of Butler have been thrown into the shade by the brighter glory of that gorgeous satiric Muse, who comes sweeping by in sceptred pall, borrowed from her most august sisters.  But the descriptions well deserve to be compared.  The reader will at once perceive a considerable difference between Butler’s

“politician, With more beads than a beast in vision,”

and the Achitophel of Dryden.  Butler dwells on Shaftesbury’s unprincipled versatility; on his wonderful and almost instinctive skill in discerning the approach of a change of fortune; and on the dexterity with which he extricated himself from the snares in which he left his associates to perish.

“Our state-artificer foresaw
Which way the world began to draw. 
For as old sinners have all points
O’ th’ compass in their bones and joints,
Can by their pangs and aches find
All turns and changes of the wind,
And better than by Napier’s bones
Feel in their own the age of moons: 
So guilty sinners in a state
Can by their crimes prognosticate,
And in their consciences feel pain
Some days before a shower of rain. 
He, therefore, wisely cast about
All ways he could to ensure his throat.”

In Dryden’s great portrait, on the contrary, violent passion, implacable revenge, boldness amounting to temerity, are the most striking features.  Achitophel is one of the “great wits to madness near allied.”  And again—­

“A daring pilot in extremity,
Pleased with the danger when the waves went high,
He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit,
Would steer too near the sands to boast his wit.”

[It has never, we believe, been remarked, that two of the most striking lines in the description of Achitophel are borrowed from a most obscure quarter.  In Knolles’s History of the Turks, printed more than sixty years before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, are the following verses, under a portrait of the Sultan Mustapha the First: