This day to hand, I now return it lame.
London, March 17. 1681.
The ingenious author tacks to his poem some rants of inimitable nonsense and scurrility in prose, in which he is pleased to intimate, that there is, from the wonderful celerity of its production, some ground for believing, that he himself, the author, had received miraculous aid.
"And if any man think or say, that it is a wonder if this book and verses were composed and writ in one day, and sent to the press, since it would employ the pen of a ready writer to copy this book in a day—it may be so.
"But it is a truth, as certain and stable as the sun in the firmament, and which, if need be, the bookseller, printer, and other worthy citizens that are privy to it, can avouch for an infallible truth—deo soli gloria—when a divine hand assists, one of despicable, dull, and inconsiderate parts, may do wonders, which God usually performs by most weak and unlikely instruments."
A single extract more may be added, to shew the high popularity of "Absalom and Achitophel" among the country gentlemen of England. "What sport it is to see an old country justice, with his eager chaplain at his elbow, putting his barnacles on his nose; bless us, how he gapes and admires Nat. Thomson, the addresses in the Gazette, Abhorrences, Heraclitus, or the Observator! But shew him but—"Absalom and Achitophel"—oh—then the man's horn mad, there's no holding him; then he hunts up, and though in his dining-room, how he spends, with double mouth, and whoops and hallows, just as he hunts his dogs when at full cry. "That—that—that—that—Rattle—Towzer—Bulldog—Thunder—that—that—" while the little trencher-chaplain echoes to him, and cries, "Amen."
With which thou flatterest thy decrepid age.—P. [439.]
Shaftesbury was at this period little above sixty years old. But he was in a state of premature decrepitude; partly owing to natural feebleness of body, and partly to an injury which he received by an overturn in a Dutch carriage when he was in Holland, in 1660, as one of the parliamentary committee. He received on this occasion a wound, or bruise in his side, which came to an internal exulceration; so that in the year 1672 he was opened by Mr Knolls the surgeon, under the direction of Dr Willis, and an issue inserted for the regular discharge of the humour. This one of his biographers has called the "greatest cure that ever was done on the body of man."[512] The royalists forgot the honourable cause in which this injury was received, nothing less than a journey undertaken to invite the king to repossession of his throne, when they made its consequences the subject of scurrilous jests.[513] Dryden had already called Shaftesbury "the formidable cripple;" and in the Essay of Satire, he sarcastically describes the contrast between the activity of his spirit, and the decrepitude of his person.