The author and precise publication date of the Reflections remain unidentified. Ascription of the poem to Buckingham rests ultimately on the authority of Wood's Athenae Oxonienses and on Wood alone, and we do not know on what evidence he thought it to be Buckingham's; we do know, however, that Wood was often mistaken over such matters. Sir Walter Scott in his collected edition of Dryden (1808; IX, 272-5) also accepted Buckingham as the author, but cited no authority; he printed extracts, yet the shortcomings of his edition, whatever its convenience, are well known. The poem has not appeared in any subsequent edition of Dryden's poems, the latest being the iv four volume set (Oxford, 1958); the volume of the California Dryden relevant to Absalom is still awaited.[A] Internal evidence is even more scanty. Only one passage of the Reflections (sig. D2) may bear on the matter. Perhaps the "Three-fold Might" (p. 7, line 11) refers, not to the poet's "tripartite design" (p. 7, line 10) or to the Triple Alliance 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]
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 v 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.
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, | couch |
| 29 | 9, | Cedar | Cedars |
| 31 | 21, | Temples | Temple |
For "No Link ... night" (p. 35, lines 19-24), the Second Edition substitutes, for an undetermined reason, the following:
No less the Lordly Zelecks Glory sound
For courage and for Constancy renoun'd:
Though once in naught but borrow'd plumes adorn'd,
So much all servile Flattery he scorn'd;
That though he held his Being and Support,
By that weak Thread the Favour of a Court,
In Sanhedrims unbrib'd, he firmly bold
Durst Truth and Israels Right unmov'd uphold;
In spight of Fortune, still to Honour wed,
By Justice steer'd, though by Dependence fed.
Very little can be said of Pordage's poem, beyond its date of publication (January 17, 1681/2)[10] and the fact that no parallel has been found with his earlier work. As no detailed study on him, published or unpublished, has been traced, we can only have recourse to the standard works on the period; data thus easily accessible are not therefore reproduced here. A so-called second edition (MacDonald 205b) is identical with the first.
In conclusion a few comments may be made on the general situation into which the poems fit. It will be remembered that Absalom and Achitophel appeared after the Exclusion Bill, the purpose of which was to debar James Duke of York from the Protestant succession, had been rejected by the House of Lords, mainly through the efforts of Halifax. Dryden's poem was advertised on November 17, 1681, and we may safely assume that it was published only a short time before Settle and our other authors were hired by the Whigs to answer it. Full details have not survived; one suspects Shaftesbury's Green Ribbon Club. That such replies were considered necessary testifies both to the popularity of Absalom and Achitophel with the layman in politics and to the Whigs' fear of its harming their cause. Settle's was of course a mercenary pen, and it is amusing to note that after ridiculing Halifax here he was quite prepared to publish, fourteen years later, Sacellum Apollinare: a Funeral Poem to the Memory of that Great Statesman, George Late Marquiss of Halifax, and on this count his place among Pope's Dunces seems merited. In tracing his quarrel with Dryden up to the publication of Absalom Senior, critics have tended to overlook the fact that by 1680 there was already hostility between the two;[11] less has been said about the effect on Dryden of the poets themselves. The spleen of his contributions to the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel is essentially a manufactured one and for the public entertainment; personally he was comparatively unmoved--the Og portrait, vii for example, is less representative than his words in "The Epistle to the Whigs" prefixed to The Medal. Here, as in Mac Flecknoe, he appears to have been able to write vituperation to order. "I have only one favor to desire of you at parting," he says, and it is "that when you think of answering this poem, you would employ the same pens against it, who have combated with so much success against Absalom and Achitophel; for then you may assure yourselves of a clear victory, without the least reply." Is it for the best that this forecast proved the right one?
For permission to reproduce their copies of texts comprising the present reprint thanks are expressed to the University of Florida Library (Absalom Senior) and to the Trustees of the British Museum (the other two poems). The University of Leeds and the City of Manchester Public Library are also thanked for leave to use contemporary marginalia in each's copy of Settle's poem. The provenance of the latter two copies of this piece is unknown; the first, now in the Brotherton Collection, bears the name William Crisp on its last blank leaf and, in abbreviated form, identifies some characters; the second, of unidentified ownership, is fuller.