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