Of his prose works the most ambitious is a little collection of Enigmaticall Characters, of which perhaps the choicest is this on the Drunkard. The Drunkard's wit "is rather the hog's-head than his own, savouring more of Heidelberg than of Helican and he being rather a drunken than a good companion."
Flecknoe dies, like the lady on whose decease he wrote an ode, "died as having nothing else to do," in the year 1678.
Such was Flecknoe. Shadwell's claim to being ranked as Flecknoe's son is amply substantiated by his own protest that in MacFlecknoe "he had been represented as an Irishman, though Mr. Dryden knew very well that he had not set eyes on the country till he was three and twenty and had remained in it then only for four months."
Dryden followed up MacFlecknoe with the character of Og in the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel. Shadwell was unable to reply; he could only faintly complain.
With Part the Second of Absalom and Achitophel the drama of the Popish Plot comes to an end. The curtain falls on this last orgy of murder. All the minor characters are now dead—for Doeg and Mephibosheth lie bleeding by the side of the monstrous Og—and only the hero remains alive. Turning with a bow to the audience, he delivers the epilogue, in which he explains, with the best of good humour, exactly why it is that he, Dryden, is still alive and all the rest lie punctured about him.
"How easy it is," so runs the epilogue, "how easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of these opprobrious terms! There is still a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me."
[ARCHITECTURE AS FORM IN CIVILISATION]
By PROFESSOR W. R. LETHABY