indifferent to the satire. He jested at the time taken[20] and the
number of hands employed upon the composition. Twenty years later he
was at pains to declare his perfect freedom from rancor in consequence
of the attack.

There, is much reason to suspect, however, that "The Rehearsal" was
not forgotten, when the "Absalom and Achitophel" was written, and that
the character of _Zimri_ gathered much of its intense vigor and depth
of shadow from recollections of the ludicrous _Mr. Bayes_. The
portrait has the look of being designed as a quittance in full of old
scores. "The Rehearsal," though now and then recast and reënacted to
suit other times, is now no otherwise remembered than as the suggester
of Sheridan's "Critic."

Upon the heels of this onslaught others followed rapidly. Rochester,
disposed to singularity of opinion, set up Elkanah Settle, a young
author of some talent, as a rival to the Laureate. Anonymous bardings
lampooned him. _Mr. Bayes_ was a broad target for every shaft, so
that the complaint so feelingly uttered in his latter days, that "no
man living had ever been so severely libelled" as he, had a wide
foundation of fact. Sometimes, it must be owned, the thrusts were the
natural result of controversies into which the Laureate indiscreetly
precipitated himself; sometimes they came of generous partisanship in
behalf of friends, such friends, for example, as Sir Robert Howard,
his brother-in-law, an interminable spinner of intolerable verse, who
afflicted the world in his day with plays worse than plagues, and
poems as worthless as his plays. It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel
against this gentleman that we are indebted for the most trenchant
satire in the language. Sir Robert had fallen out with Dryden about
rhyming tragedies, of which he disapproved; and while it lasted, the