Justice & Law Quote by John Dryden

A neat little couplet of power politics disguised as a tidy ranking system. Dryden’s line turns government into a ladder: at the bottom, “the law” - impersonal, procedural, supposedly stable; at the top, “prerogative” - the sovereign’s discretionary right to override or suspend the rules when it suits the state (or the ruler). The phrasing is doing the real work. “First” flatters the idea that law is foundational, the respectable starting point. “Last” crowns prerogative as the final word, the backstop that wins when everything else runs out. It’s a hierarchy, not a balance.

Dryden writes from the pressure cooker of Restoration England, when the monarchy is back, memories of civil war are fresh, and the question isn’t whether authority needs limits but who gets to decide when limits stop applying. Prerogative, in this moment, is the polished term for exception: an elegant license for emergency measures, patronage, censorship, and the occasional “trust me.” Dryden, a court-aligned poet who benefited from royal favor, is rarely innocent when he makes order sound natural.

The line also performs a clever rhetorical bait-and-switch. By naming law first, it borrows law’s moral legitimacy; by naming prerogative last, it normalizes override power as the inevitable endpoint of governance. The subtext is blunt: rules are for ordinary times and ordinary people. When stakes rise, authority reverts to the person at the top. In a culture trying to re-sanctify monarchy, that’s not just poetry; it’s propaganda with meter.