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Article: The 'all-attoning name': the word patriot in seventeenth-century England.
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- July 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Reigning words are many times of such force as to influence us considerably in our apprehension of things.
(Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury)
John Dryden's 'All-attoning Name' is the word patriot, which he accorded to the first Earl of Shaftesbury in 'Absolom and Achitophel' (1681), a satire on the political turmoil of the Exclusion Crisis. (1) In the above epigraph, Shaftesbury's grandson is lamenting the absence in English of an adequate equivalent to the Latin patria which would give expression to 'love to one's country', 'something moral and social [...] a naturally civil and political state', 'a civil state or nation', rather than just ...