written by the duke of Buckingham, with the assistance, it was said, of
Samuel Butler, Martin Clifford, Thomas Sprat and others, and produced in
1671, was a severe and just punishment for this boast. Davenant was
originally the hero, but on his death in 1668 the satire was turned upon
Dryden, who is here unmercifully ridiculed under the name of Bayes, the
name being justified by his appointment in 1670 as poet laureate and
historiographer to the king (with a pension of L300 a year and a butt of
canary wine). It is said that _The Rehearsal_ was begun in 1663 and
ready for representation before the plague. But this probably only means
that Buckingham and his friends had resolved to burlesque the
absurdities of Davenant's operatic heroes in _The Siege of Rhodes_, and
the extravagant heroics of _The Indian Queen_. Materials accumulated
upon them as the fashion continued, and by the time Dryden had produced
his _Tyrannic Love_, and his _Conquest of Granada_, he had so
established himself as the chief offender as to become naturally the
central figure of the burlesque. Later Dryden fully avenged himself on
Buckingham by his portrait of Zimri in _Absalom and Achitophel_. His
immediate reply is contained in the preface "Of Heroic Plays" and the
"Defence of the Epilogue," printed in the first edition (1672) of his
_Conquest of Granada_. In these, so far from laughing with his censors,
he addresses them from the eminence of success. "But I have already
swept the stakes; and, with the common good fortune of prosperous
gamesters, can be content to sit quietly; to hear my fortune cursed by
some, and my faults arraigned by others, and to suffer both without
reply." Heroic verse, he assures them, is so established that few
tragedies are likely henceforward to be written in any other metre. In
the course of a year or two _The Conquest of Granada_ was attacked also
by Elkanah Settle, on whom Dryden revenged himself later, making him the
"Doeg" of the second part of _Absalom and Achitophel_.

His next tragedy, _Amboyna_ (1673), an exhibition of certain atrocities
committed by the Dutch on English merchants in the East Indies, put on
the stage to inflame the public mind in view of the Dutch war, was
written, with the exception of a few passages, in prose, and those
passages in blank verse. An opera which he wrote in rhymed couplets,
called _The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man_, an attempt to turn
part of _Paradise Lost_ into rhyme, as