[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_.]