John William Cousin, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature… (1910)
“ He attached himself to the Whigs, and when Dryden attacked them in Absalom and Achitophel and The Medal, had the temerity to assail him scurrilously in The Medal of John Bayes (1682) . The castigation which this evoked in MacFlecknoe and in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, in which S. figures as "Og," has conferred upon him an unenviable immortality. He may have found some consolation in his succession to Dryden as Poet Laureate when, at the Revolution, the latter was deprived of the office. ”
