ance of England, Holland, and
Sweden against France (1677/8, as in _Absalom and Achitophel_, line
175) but either to a treatise which had occasioned some stir in the
scientific world some twenty years previously: "the Delphic problem"
proposed by Hobbes to the Royal Society on the duplication of the cube,
which might have come to the ears of Buckingham as well as to those of
the court,[3] or perhaps to the triple confederacy of Essex, Halifax,
and Sunderland.[4] But to the Restoration reader the phrase "Three-fold
Might" would rather have suggested the Triple Alliance, to which Dryden
reverts in _The Medal_ (lines 65-68) when he claims that Shaftesbury,
"thus fram'd for ill, ... loos'd our Triple Hold" on Europe.[5]

[Transcriber's Footnote (A):
This Introduction was written in 1959. Volume II of the California
Edition (_The Works of John Dryden_) was published in 1972.]

[Footnote 3: Hobbes, _English Works_ (1845), ed. by Molesworth, VII,
59-68.]

[Footnote 4: H. C. Foxcroft, _A Character of the Trimmer_
(Cambridge, England, 1946), p. 70. This book is an abridged
version of the same author's _Life and Works of Halifax_ (1897).]

[Footnote 5: Cf. the phrase "Twofold might" in _Absalom and
Achitophel_, I, 175.]

Evidence against Buckingham's authorship, on the other hand, is
comparatively strong. The piece does not appear in his collected _Works_
(1704-5). It surely would have been included even though he had at first
wished to claim any credit from its publication and later have wished to
disown it. Little connection, furthermore, will be found between the
_Reflections_ and the rest of his published verse or with the plays,
including _The Rehearsal_, if the latter be his alone, which is
doubtful.

_Poetical Reflections_ has been ascribed to Edward Howard. W. Thomas
Lowndes in his _Bibliographer's Manual_ (1864; II, 126) assigned to this
minor writer, on the authority of an auction note, the little collection
_Poems and Essays, with a Paraphrase on Cicero's Laelius, or, Of
Friendship ... By a Gentleman_ (1674), and G. Thorn-Drury, on the
equally debatable evidence of an anonymous manuscript ascription on
the title page of his own copy, ascribed the _Poetical Reflections_ to
Howard.[6] An examination of the _Poems and Essays_, however, reveals no
point of resemblance with our poem. How, then, does Howard fit into the
picture? He was in the rival camp to Dryden and was a frien