His Majesties Declaration Defended

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The Augustan Reprint Society
John Dryden His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681)
With an Introduction by Godfrey Davies
Publication Number 23 (Series IV, No. 4)
Los Angeles William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California 1950
GENERAL EDITORS H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library Richard C. Boys, University Of Michigan Edward Niles Hooker, University Of California, Los Angeles H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., University Of California, Los Angeles
ASSISTANT EDITORS W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan John Loftis, University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan Cleanth Brooks, Yale University James L. Clifford, Columbia University Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Ernest Mossner, University of Texas James Sutherland, Queen Mary College, London
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.