well known that there were no manuscripts found among Dryden's papers on his death. Dryden himself says that although the materials were ready, prepared, he desisted from publishing them on the advice of the Earl of Mulgrave. The fact that these materials were prepared and in the consciousness of the critic while he was writing the documents of the late eighties and the nineties warrants the hypothesis that the facts contained in the prosodia may be reflected in Dryden's scattered critical statements. The number of these statements is extremely large and when collected they fit into a rough scheme for a prosodia which compares favorably with similar works written by Dryden's fellows or near contemporaries. Recent historians, however, overlook the value of these references entirely. Omond, ignoring Dryden's statement, omits it in the bibliography of English metrists (1903), but corrects this error in the appendix to his later work.2 Saintsbury asserts that "his [Dryden's] reference to this part of it [metrics] are few and mostly vague."3 A collection of these references-there are approximately two hundred of them-leads to conclusions as follows: