1681 In This Respect Like 2023
Yet another example of the unerring eye of the Poet
Writing analogously of his contemporary, the statesman Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, John Dryden committed these lines to a rendering of the traitor Achitophel, counselor to and betrayer of David, who after encouraging David’s son Absalom in a failed rebellion against him, hanged himself.
How apt are these lines to the America of the present-day!
Read them aloud to hear their regal music that buoys the ideas until the ultimate line which leads downwards into the inescapable abyss of its conclusion.
In friendship false, implacable in hate:
Resolv'd to ruin or to rule the state.
To compass this, the triple bond he broke;
The pillars of the public safety shook:
And fitted Israel for a foreign yoke.
Then, seiz'd with fear, yet still affecting fame,
Usurp'd a patriot's all-atoning name.
So easy still it proves in factious times,
With public zeal to cancel private crimes:
How safe is treason, and how sacred ill,
Where none can sin against the people's will:
Where crowds can wink; and no offence be known,
Since in another's guilt they find their own.
— From Absalom and Achitophel (1681)
The tables turned for Shaftesbury, after high office as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Others more powerful than he smashed the “Cabal” which he helped to lead and ended his life as an exile.
Years ago, when lucky me visited the Yale University art galleries virtually every day during my lunch hour, I saw (perhaps a dozen times or more) this portrait of Buckingham, a contemporary of Shaftesbury, who fared worse.
A genius of painterly description! Note the greenish tinge of the skin — he has been dead for days, abandoned alone to his miserable fate in a pauperish bed as the gloomy sun rises upon the scene, as if the viewer had just opened the door, having smelled the stench from the hall.
