SHADWELL, Thomas (1640-1692), a playwright and miscellaneous versifier of the Restoration period, Dryden’s successor in the laureateship, is remembered now, not by his works, though he was a prolific writer of comedies highly successful in their day, but as the subject of Dryden’s satirical portraits “MacFlecknoe” and “Og.” He was a native of Norfolk—not an Irishman, as he retorted with significant imbecility when Dryden’s satire appeared,—went through the forms of study at Cambridge and the Inner Temple, travelled abroad for a little, returned to London, cultivated the literary society of coffee-houses and taverns, and in 1668, at the age of 28, gained the ear of the stage with a comedy The Sullen Lovers. For fourteen years afterwards, till his memorable encounter with Dryden he continued regularly to produce a comedy nearly every year, showing considerable cleverness in caricaturing the oddities of the time. Ben Jonson was his model, but he drew his materials largely from contemporary hfe. He also acquired standing among the wits as a talker. In the quarrel with Dryden he was the aggressor. They had been good enough friends, and Dryden in 1679 had furnished him with a prologue for his True Widow. But when Dryden threw in his lot with the court, and satirized the opposition in Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal, Shadwell was rash enough to constitute himself the champion of the true-blue Protestants and wrote a grossly personal and scurrilous attack on the poet, entitled The Medal of John Bayes. Dryden immediately retorted in MacFlecknoe, the most powerful and contemptuously scornful personal satire in our language, adding next month a few more rough touches of supercilious mockery in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, where Shadwell figures ...