been dismissed as of small worth--but rather as a poem representative of
much of the versifying that followed hard on the Popish Plot and as one
that has inspired great speculation as to its author; the third, in
addition to throwing light on the others, is a typical specimen of the
lesser work produced in the Absalom dispute.

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 four volume set (Oxford, 1958);
the volume of the California Dryden[A] relevant to _Absalom_ is still
awaited. 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,