This is a biographical book. Wherever English literature is studied, John Dryden is recognized as the author of some of the greatest political satires in the language. Until recently the fact has been overlooked that before he wrote the first of these satires, Absalom and Achitophel, he had entered the political arena with the prose tract here reproduced. The proof that the Historiographer Royal contributed to the anti-Whig propaganda of the spring of 1681 depends partly on contemporary or near-contemporary statements but principally on internal evidence. An article by Professor Roswell G. Ham (The Review of English Studies, XI (1935), 284-98; Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden, A Bibliography, p. 167) demonstrated Dryden's authorship so satisfactorily that it is unnecessary to set forth here the arguments that established this thesis. The time when Dryden was composing his defence of the royal Declaration is approximately fixed from the reference to it on June 22, 1681, in The Observator, which had noted the Whig pamphlet Dryden was answering under the date of May 26.
