Anti-Achitophel | Page 2

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 friend 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 suppose that it was printed from any copy other than the First, they may be merely the result of carelessness.
FIRST EDITION SECOND EDITION
p. 3, line 4, enthron'd, with inthron'd with
3 8, Arts ... steps Art's ... step's?11 10, Rods; Rods??13 26, to Descend do Descend
14 17, couch,