“Greatnesse on goodnesse loves to slide, not stand, And leaves for Fortune’s ice Vertue’s firme land.”

Dryden’s words are

“But wild Ambition loves to slide, not stand,
And Fortune’s ice prefers to Virtue’s land.”

The circumstance is the more remarkable, because Dryden has really no couplet which would seem to a good critic more intensely Drydenian, both in thought and expression, than this, of which the whole thought, and almost the whole expression, are stolen.

As we are on this subject, we cannot refrain from observing that Mr. Courtenay has done Dryden injustice by inadvertently attributing to him some feeble lines which are in Tate’s part of Absalom and Achitophel.]

The dates of the two poems will, we think, explain this discrepancy.  The third part of Hudibras appeared in 1678, when the character of Shaftesbury had as yet but imperfectly developed itself.  He had, indeed, been a traitor to every party in the State; but his treasons had hitherto prospered.  Whether it were accident or sagacity, he had timed his desertions in such a manner that fortune seemed to go to and fro with him from side to side.  The extent of his perfidy was known; but it was not till the Popish Plot furnished him with a machinery which seemed sufficiently powerful for all his purposes, that the audacity of his spirit, and the fierceness of his malevolent passions, became fully manifest.  His subsequent conduct showed undoubtedly great ability, but not ability of the sort for which he had formerly been so eminent.  He was now headstrong, sanguine, full of impetuous confidence in his own wisdom and his own good luck.  He, whose fame as a political tactician had hitherto rested chiefly on his skilful retreats, now set himself to break down all the bridges behind him.  His plans were castles in the air:  his talk was rhodomontade.  He took no thought for the morrow:  he treated the Court as if the King were already a prisoner in his hands:  he built on the favour of the multitude, as if that favour were not proverbially inconstant.  The signs of the coming reaction were discerned by men of far less sagacity than his, and scared from his side men more consistent than he had ever pretended to be.  But on him they were lost.  The counsel of Achitophel, that counsel which was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God, was turned into foolishness.  He who had become a by-word, for the certainty with which he foresaw and the suppleness with which he evaded danger, now, when beset on every side with snares and death, seemed to be smitten with a blindness as strange as his former clear-sightedness, and, turning neither to the right nor to the left, strode straight on with desperate hardihood to his doom.  Therefore, after having early acquired and long preserved the reputation of infallible wisdom and invariable success, he lived to see a mighty ruin wrought by his own ungovernable passions, to see the great party which he had led vanquished,