One of those who most fiercely attacked our author’s system and opinions was Matthew[19] Clifford, already mentioned as engaged in the “Rehearsal.”  At what precise time he began his Notes upon Dryden’s Poems, in Four Letters, or how they were originally published, is uncertain.  The last of the letters is dated from the Charter-House 1st July 1672, and is signed with his name:  probably the others were written shortly before.  The only edition now known was printed along with some “Reflections on the Hind and Panther, by another Hand” (Tom Brown), in 1687.  If these letters were not actually printed in 1672, they were probably successively made public by transcripts handed about in the coffee-houses which was an usual mode of circulating lampoons and pieces of satire.  Although Clifford was esteemed a man of wit and a scholar, his style is rude, coarse, and ungentlemanlike, and the criticism is chiefly verbal.  In the note the reader may peruse an ample specimen of the kind of wit, or rather banter, employed by this facetious person.[20] The letters were written successively at different periods; for Clifford in the last complains that he cannot extort an answer, and therefore seems to conceive that his arguments are unanswerable.

There were several other pamphlets, and fugitive pieces, published against Dryden at the same time.  One of them, entitled “The Censure of the Rota on Mr. Dryden’s Conquest of Granada,” was printed at Oxford in 1673.  This was followed by a similar piece, entitled, “A description of the Academy of Athenian Virtuosi, with a Discourse held there in Vindication of Mr. Dryden’s Conquest of Granada against the Author of the Censure of the Rota.”  And a third, called “A Friendly Vindication of Mr. Dryden from the Author of the Censure of the Rota,” was printed at Cambridge.  All these appeared previous to the publication of the “Assignation.”  The first, as Wood informs us, was written by Richard Leigh, educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he entered in 1665, and was probably resident when this piece was there published.  He was afterwards a player in the Duke’s Company, but must be carefully distinguished from the celebrated comedian of the same name.  It seems likely that he wrote also the second tract, which is a continuation of the first.  Both are in a frothy, flippant style of raillery, of which the reader will find a specimen in the note.[21] The Cambridge Vindication seems to have been written by a different hand, though in the same taste.  It is singular in bringing a charge against our author which has been urged by no other antagonist; for he is there upbraided with exhibiting in his comedies the persons and follies of living characters.[22]