Dryden's temples before he experienced the assaults of an organized literary opposition. The Duke of Buckingham, then the admitted leader of fashionable prodigacy, borrowed the aid of Samuel Butler, at whose "Hudibras" the world was still laughing,--of Thomas Sprat, then on the high-road to those preferments which have given him an important place in history,--of Martin Clifford, a familiar of the green-room and coffee-house,--and concocted a farce ridiculing the person and office of the Laureate. "The Rehearsal" was acted in 1671. The hero, _Mr. Bayes_, imitated all the personal peculiarities of Dryden, used his cant phrases, burlesqued his style, and exposed, while pretending to defend, his ridiculous points, until the laugh of the town was fairly turned upon the "premier-poet of the realm." The wit was undoubtedly of the broadest, and the humor at the coffee-room level; but it was so much the more effective. Dryden affected to be 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."