Besides avenging abundance of personal abuse, Dryden, in the person of Shadwell, chastises a great supporter of the Whig cause and principles. Shadwell himself complains, that, in the days of Charles and James, he "was silenced for a non-conformist poet." He was the chief among the "corrector-men," as the authors and publishers of the Whig party were oddly entitled;[438] and received the reward of his principles at the Revolution, succeeding, as is well known, our author in the office of poet laureat. In the epilogue to the "Volunteers," a play of Shadwell's, acted after his death, the friends of the Revolution are called upon to applaud their favourite bard's last production:
Crown you his last performance with applause,
Who love, like him, our liberties and laws;
Let but the honest party do him right,
And their loud claps will give him fame, in spite
Of the faint hiss of grumbling Jacobite.
These, gloomy, thoughtful, and on mischief bent;
While those for mere good fellowship frequent
The appointed club, can let sedition pass,