d of Martin
Clifford[7] and of Thomas Sprat, then Buckingham's chaplain: these three
have been thought to be jointly responsible for _The Rehearsal_. Sprat
had published a poem of congratulation to Howard on Howard's _The
British Princes_ (1669), the latter a long pseudo-epic of the Blackmore
style in dreary couplets which, again, provides no parallel with the
_Reflections_. And what of Howard's plays? Many of these were written
in the 1660's during his poetic apprenticeship; none seems akin to our
poem. Whereas, as shown in the Table of Allusions below, two independent
readers often agreed over the identities of many characters in Settle's
poem, Restoration readers at large were reticent over the authorship
of the _Reflections_. Hugh Macdonald, in his useful _John Dryden: a
Bibliography_ (1939), was wise to follow their example, and it seems
rash, therefore, to propose any new candidate in the face of such
negative evidence. The poem exists in two states, apparently differing
only in the title page.

[Footnote 6: _Review of English Studies_, I (1925) 82-83.]

[Footnote 7: In his _Notes upon Mr. Dryden's Poems in Four Letters_
(1687) Clifford, in 16 pages, accuses Dryden of plagiarism,
especially in _Almanzor_.]

Evidence of Settle's authorship of _Absalom Senior_, on the other hand,
is neither wanting nor disputed. We have had to wait until our own
century for the pioneer work on this writer, since he cannot have been
considered a sufficiently major poet by Samuel Johnson's sponsors, and
Langbaine's account is sketchy. In a periodical paper[8] Macdonald
summarized supplementary evidence on the dates of composition of
Settle's poem; he was working on it in January 1681/2, and it was
published on the following April 6. Lockyer, Dean of Peterborough,
asserted to Joseph Spence, who includes the rumor in _Anecdotes_, that
Settle was assisted by Clifford and Sprat and by "several best hands of
those times";[9] but Spence is notoriously unreliable. In the lack of
other evidence, then, it seems best to take the poem as wholly Settle's.
It needs only to add a few words on its textual states. The First
Edition, here reproduced, seems to exist in a single impression, and
likewise the Second Edition of the Settle (1682, in quarto) seems to
have been struck off in a single textual state. Of its individual
variants from the First Edition only the following seem of any
significance and, since there is no reason to