Upon the heels of this onslaught others followed rapidly.  Rochester, disposed to singularity of opinion, set up Elkanah Settle, a young author of some talent, as a rival to the Laureate.  Anonymous bardings lampooned him. Mr. Bayes was a broad target for every shaft, so that the complaint so feelingly uttered in his latter days, that “no man living had ever been so severely libelled” as he, had a wide foundation of fact.  Sometimes, it must be owned, the thrusts were the natural result of controversies into which the Laureate indiscreetly precipitated himself; sometimes they came of generous partisanship in behalf of friends, such friends, for example, as Sir Robert Howard, his brother-in-law, an interminable spinner of intolerable verse, who afflicted the world in his day with plays worse than plagues, and poems as worthless as his plays.  It was to a quarrel for and a quarrel against this gentleman that we are indebted for the most trenchant satire in the language.  Sir Robert had fallen out with Dryden about rhyming tragedies, of which he disapproved; and while it lasted, the contest was waged with prodigious acrimony.  Among the partisans of the former was Richard Flecknoe, a Triton among the smaller scribbling fry.  Flecknoe—­blunderingly classed among the Laureates by the compiler of “Cibber’s Lives of the Poets”—­was an Irish priest, who had cast his cassock, or, as he euphuistically expressed it, “laid aside the mechanic part of priesthood,” in order to fulfil the loftier mission of literary garreteer in London.  He had written poems and plays without number; of the latter, but one, entitled “Love’s Dominion,” had been brought upon the stage, and was summarily hissed off.  Jealousy of Dryden’s splendid success brought him to the side of Dryden’s opponent, and a pamphlet, printed in 1668, attacked the future Laureate so bitterly, and at points so susceptible, as to make a more than ordinary draft upon the poet’s patience, and to leave venom that rankled fourteen years without finding vent.[21] About the same time, Thomas Shadwell, who is represented in the satire as likewise an Irishman, brought Sir Robert on the stage in his “Sullen Lovers,” in the character of Sir Positive At-all, a caricature replete with absurd self-conceit and impudent dogmatism.  Shadwell was of “Norfolcian” family, well-born, well-educated, and fitted for the bar, but drawn away from serious pursuits by the prevalent rage for the drama.  The offence of laughing at the poet’s brother-in-law Shadwell had aggravated by accepting the capricious patronage of Lord Rochester, by subsequently siding with the Whigs, and by aiding the ambitious designs of Shaftesbury in play and pamphlet,—­labors the value of which is not to be measured by the contemptuous estimate of the satirist.  The first outburst of the retributive storm fell upon the head of Shadwell.  The second part of “Absalom and Achitophel,” which appeared in the autumn of 1682, contains the portrait of Og, cut in outlines so sharp as to remind us of an unrounded alto-rilievo:—­