'Absalom and Achitophel' he drew the portrait of Buckingham as Zimri. But
in 1680 an outrage of which he was the victim, a brutal and unprovoked
beating inflicted by ruffians in the employ of the Earl of Rochester, seems
to mark a permanent change for the worse in his fortunes, a change not
indeed to disaster but to a permanent condition of doubtful prosperity.

The next year he became engaged in political controversy, which resulted in
the production of his most famous work. Charles II was without a legitimate
child, and the heir to the throne was his brother, the Duke of York, who a
few years later actually became king as James II. But while Charles was
outwardly, for political reasons, a member of the Church of England (at
heart he was a Catholic), the Duke of York was a professed and devoted
Catholic, and the powerful Whig party, strongly Protestant, was violently
opposed to him. The monstrous fiction of a 'Popish Plot,' brought forward
by Titus Oates, and the murderous frenzy which it produced, were
demonstrations of the strength of the Protestant feeling, and the leader of
the Whigs, the Earl of Shaftesbury, proposed that the Duke of York should
be excluded by law from the succession to the throne in favor of the Duke
of Monmouth, one of the king's illegitimate sons. At last, in 1681, the
nation became afraid of another civil war, and the king was enabled to have
Shaftesbury arrested on the charge of treason. Hereupon Dryden, at the
suggestion, it is said, of the king, and with the purpose of securing
Shaftesbury's conviction, put forth the First Part of 'Absalom and
Achitophel,' a masterly satire of Shaftesbury, Monmouth, and their
associates in the allegorical disguise of the (somewhat altered) Biblical
story of David and Absalom. [Footnote: The subsequent history of the affair
was as follows: Shaftesbury was acquitted by the jury, and his enthusiastic
friends struck a medal in his honor, which drew from Dryden a short and
less important satire, 'The Medal.' To this in turn a minor poet named
Shadwell replied, and Dryden retorted with 'Mac Flecknoe.' The name means