' What boots it,
after this eulogy, to call Buckhurst the king of poets?
after this eulogy, to call Buckhurst the king of poets?
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
.
Rowe's solitary comedy, The Biter, produced in 1705, was a
failure. According to Johnson, the author's applause was the
only sound of approval heard in the theatre at its production.
It was succeeded by the tragedy Ulysses (1706), a tedious and
ineffective drama which lacks Rowe's usual strong appeal to the
pity of his audience. Neither this play nor The Royal Convert
(1707)very dull, with a background of mythical British history,
calls for special comment. Rowe's last two plays bear a strong
likeness to one another. The Tragedy of Jane Shore 'in imita-
tion of Shakespeare's style,' produced in 1714, has been said to bear
no closer resemblance to Shakespeare than is to be found in the
fact that like some of his plays it is based upon an episode in the
history of England. It is, however, a good acting play, which,
even now, has not entirely disappeared from the stage. It af-
forded Mrs Siddons one of her most tremendous opportunities for
realistic acting. As Jane Shore, drifting half-starved about the
streets of London, eye-witnesses report that the audience 'abso-
lutely thought her the creature perishing through want'-and
'could not avoid turning from the suffering object. '
In the following year (1715), Rowe succeeded Tate as poet
laureate and produced his last play, The Tragedy of the Lady
Jane Gray. This play, as well as its predecessor, and, to some
extent, Rowe's other dramatic works, display a certain nobility of
outlook and purity of purpose, in marked and refreshing contrast
1 Among the most interesting revivals were those by Garrick in 1743 and 1746,
when he played Lothario, and those of 1782 and subsequent years when Mrs Siddons,
as Calista, electrified her audiences, particularly in the scene with Horatio in the third
act, where he accuses her of being false to her husband and his friend, Altamont. In
1803, a revival of the play took place, when the cast included Mrs Siddons and both
the Kemble brothers.
## p. 197 (#219) ############################################
Nicholas Rowe
197
to the pruriency in which the English drama bad for half a
century been steeped. The unexceptionably moral and patriotic
tone of Rowe's last play, as well as its protestant spirit, affords a
very striking proof of the change that had come over the English
stage since the revolution and the publication of Jeremy Collier's
Short View.
.
Like Otway, Rowe attempted to move his audiences to pity
and terror; but, with few exceptions, his dramas leave us cold
and unmoved. He contrives situations with considerable skill,
but he generally fails to make his characters rise to them; nor do
they give vent to their feelings in language which is always either
touching in itself, or suitable to the surrounding circumstances.
His plays are the calm and finished performances of an author
who felt but faintly the emotions which he sought to portray, and
who, by the introduction of what he very aptly calls 'the pomp of
horror,' hoped to find his way to the feelings of his readers.
Criticism and the public taste, in fact, have alike moved far since
Johnson wrote of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, 'There is scarcely
any work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so
delightful by the language. ' He has, however, other claims to
the respect of posterity. Of the significance of his edition of
Shakespeare's works (1709), something has been said in an earlier
volume? ; while his translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, which was
first published as a whole in 1718 (shortly after his death), and
of which at least nine editions appeared between that date and
1822, is, probably, at the present day, his least forgotten work.
He also translated in verse Boileau's Lutrin (1708). Rowe was
an accomplished modern, as well as classical, scholar, and his
personality is one of dignity, as well as of interest, in the history
of English literature.
* See vol. V, chap. XI, pp. 267—8.
## p. 198 (#220) ############################################
CHAPTER VIII
THE COURT POETS
6
THE career of the Court Poets is an episode not merely in the
history of literature but in the history of manners. In their lives
as in their art, they were an outspoken protest against the domina-
tion of the puritans. Whatever their predecessors in their stern
morality had disdained, they pursued with a rare fervency of spirit.
The chief end of their ambition was to catch pleasure on the wing,
and they gave to pleasure a liberal interpretation. Gallantry was
not enough for them. No courtier could hope to win the approval
of his sovereign who had not given proof of his wit,' who had not
publicly burned incense before the muse of frivolity. So it came
about that, in Sedley's phrase, 'every fop wrote songs,' that few
refrained from libelling their friends in satire, and that a freedom
in written, as in spoken, speech matched the prevailing freedom of
thought and conduct
The court, in brief, cherished an ideal hitherto strange to
English austerity. It no longer took a keen interest in rival policies.
The bitter conflict of the civil war, followed by the domination of
Oliver, had obscured the spark of patriotism which burned only
in a few loyal hearts. The king and his courtiers were determined
to amuse themselves. They had learned in Paris how to temper
their magnificence with wit and politesse, and, in the glamour of
beauty and courage, they forgot the long, dark days when all
the decorative arts of life had been banished, when even the smile
of irony was deemed a disgrace. Charles II, a monarch to whom
most things were easy save wisdom, led the band of revellers,
preferred the ribaldry of Buckhurst and Sedley to the grave advice
of Arlington, sauntered away his days in the society of his
mistresses, and delighted in satire, even though it was directed
against himself. It was a golden age, truly, in which life seemed
desirable for its own sake, and in which nobody thought of its
drearier purpose.
Les plus honnêtes gens du monde, says
## p. 199 (#221) ############################################
The Circle of Whitehall 199
Saint-Évremond, ce sont les Français qui pensent, et les Anglais
qui parlent. And at Whitehall, which he graced by his presence
for many years, he might have encountered them both.
Such is one side of the medal. The reverse is less attractive.
If it were frivolity whose muse reigned in Whitehall, it was a
pompous frivolity. There was very little spontaneous gaiety in the
court of the returned king. The intention to be gay was so loudly
expressed that it seemed to come from the head rather than from
the heart. The sense of relief, the determination to be happy at
all costs, suggest that a spice of malice flavoured the joyousness of
the courtiers. In what they said and did there was no trace of the
golden mean. Their merriment was too often the merriment of
constraint. Rochester declares in one of his letters that it wasn't
safe for a man to leave the court, if he didn't want to be hanged.
The exploits set forth in the Mémoires de Gramont, are, so to say,
conscious of reaction. Their persistent monotony fatigues us who
read of them, as perchance they fatigued the courtiers who are
their heroes. The king and his friends were too flagrantly
industrious in the pursuit of pleasure. Gramont himself was not
content to rely upon his own graces for success. He wooed his
goddesses with 'gloves, pocket looking-glasses, elegant boxes,
apricot paste, essences, and other small wares of love. ' To be
jealous without being in love, to play for stakes so high that they
could not be paid without distress, to indulge in practical jokes
which had no better excuse than physical infirmity—these are not
the marks of happiness. They were the misfortunes of everyone
who came within the circle of Whitehall. The manners of the
time thus proved the best material for satire and comedy. There
was, perhaps, more joy in their contemplation than in their exercise.
Pepys, who lived on the fringe of the Court, was gay, because he
carried his indomitable gaiety into the simplest affairs of his life.
We can believe that there was a flash of genuine gaiety at Epsom,
when Nell Gwynn and Buckhurst ‘kept mery house' there. But
the pleasure of Charles II's court was marred by the inverse of
puritanism. It was austere even in its love-making.
At times, the courtiers broke through all the bonds of restraint.
They thought it no shame to commit acts of violence in the streets.
Once upon a time, Buckhurst and his friends killed a tanner at
Stoke Newington whom they suspected of theft, and whose pockets
they emptied, as of stolen goods. A far worse scandal was caused
by Sir Charles Sedley's amazing apparition at Oxford Kate's in
Bow street. He came in open day, as Pepys tells us,
## p. 200 (#222) ############################################
200
The Court Poets
into the Balconie and showed his nakedness. . . and abusing of scripture and
as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit,
saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the women
run after him, 1,000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and
that being done he took a glass of wine, and drank it off, and then took
another and drank the King's health.
It is not surprising that the unbridled conduct of Sir Charles
Sedley and of Buckhurst, who was of the company, came near to
causing a riot, brought the offenders before the court, and received
from the lord chief justice 'a most high reproof. ' The news of
these pranks, moreover, went abroad, and lost nothing, we may be
sure, in the telling. The voice of scandal was noisy and unscrupu-
lous, then as now; and, though it is evident that the 'wits' were
not innocent of brutality, it is unfair to judge all their lives by one
or two episodes. Hasty generalisation is ever the foe of truth, and
charges are more lightly made than refuted. No man, for instance,
was ever so careless of his reputation as Rochester, and even he
protests in a letter addressed to Savile against an unfounded
indictment. Accused of the same folly as that of which Sedley
and Buckhurst were guilty, he was eager in excuse.
'For the hideous deportment,' he writes, which you have heard of, concern-
ing running naked, so much is true, that we went into the river somewhat
late in the year, and had a frisk for forty yards in a meadow, to dry ourselves. '
The trivial adventure was instantly turned to his disgrace, and so
deeply sensible was he of the public contempt that he confessed
himself 'extremely revived at the receipt of a kind letter from an
old friend. ' 'I ever thought you an extraordinary man,' says he,
and must now think you such a friend, who, being a courtier, as
you are, can love a man, whom it is the great mode to hate. '
Nor was exaggeration the only foe of the wits. Many there
were, without a spark of talent, who imitated the vices of Rochester
and Sedley, and who, by their senseless extravagance, brought their
betters into contempt. When wit became a fashion, the fools
could ape it, and the poets have been compelled ever since to bear a
weight of unmerited odium. Pepys once strayed into the society of
these pretenders, and their talk made even his hard heart ache.
‘But, Lord! what cursed loose company was this,' says he, that I was
in to-night, though full of wit; and worth a man's being in once to
know the nature of it, and their manner of talk, and lives. ' Pepys's
curiosity no doubt got the better of his judgment, and the wit of
these men, who called themselves the 'Ballers,' was probably as
false as their pretence. They are memorable only because they did
the poets an injustice-an injustice which no less a man than
## p. 201 (#223) ############################################
Men of Action
201
Dryden has removed. None knew better than he their talents and
their lives, and he treated them as true Augustans, praising their
eruditam voluptatem.
“We have,' said he, like the poets of the Horatian age, our genial nights,
when our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant,
and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the
present, nor too censorious on the absent, and the cups only such as will raise
the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow. '
As in duty bound, he who had been admitted to these banquets of
wit and sense defended them against the detraction of pedants.
The wits, said he, were insulted by those who knew them not.
'As we draw giants and anthropophagi. '—to cite his words in those vacan-
cies of our maps, where we have not travelled to discover better, so those
wretches paint lewdness, atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of
extravagances amongst us, for want of knowing what we are. '
It was not difficult to rebut precise charges. The wits, described
by the ignorant, were the fops whom Dryden and his friends
banished. As for blasphemy and atheism, even if they were not
ill manners, they were worn threadbare. In other words, the true
wits are blamed for the excesses of those who had never tasted the
waters of Helicon.
If the court poets needed a defence, they could not have
found a wiser, juster defence than Dryden's. But even when they
have been relieved of the crimes of which others were guilty, there
is another misunderstanding which should be dispelled. The
brutalities of Rochester, Buckhurst and Sedley were the brutalities
of a fierce, unscrupulous youth, and mere incidents in long and
honourable careers. To pretend that these courtiers carried their
pranks into a ripe old age is to endow them with perpetual strength
and high spirits. Rochester, it is true, died on the very threshold
of middle life. The rest grew sober with the years. Buckhurst
was presently transformed into a grave and taciturn man, well
versed in affairs, and entrusted, in William III's absence, with the
regency of the kingdom. Sedley, too, turned politician, was guilty
of 'reflections on our late proceedings and delivered speeches
upon ways and means. In brief, the court poets were like those
who, in other times, shared their talent and temperament. They
seized life with both hands, and wrung from it at each stage
whatever of varying ease and pleasure it held.
And they were men of action as well as men of letters. There
was scarcely one of them that had not taken arms in the service of
their country. They proved their gallantry on the field of battle
as on the field of love. In later years, a charge of cowardice was
## p. 202 (#224) ############################################
202
The Court Poets
brought against Rochester. The bravery of his youth is beyond
dispute. He was but seventeen when he went to sea with Lord
Sandwich, and, on board The Revenge, took part in the famous
attack upon Bergen, where the Dutch ships had taken refuge.
Of this action he left a spirited account in a letter addressed to his
mother. A year later he was in the great sea fight, serving under
Sir Edward Spragge, and there gave a signal proof of his courage.
During the action,' says Burnet, Sir Edward Spragge, not being satisfied
with the behaviour of one of the Captains, could not easily find a Person, that
would cheerfully venture through so much danger, to carry his commands to
that captain. This Lord offered himself to the service, and went in a little
boat through all the shot, and delivered his message, and returned back to
Sir Edward: which was much commended by all that saw it. '
Buckhurst was not a whit behind Rochester in courage; he was
present, a volunteer, on the duke of York's ship in the battle of
3 June 1665, when the Dutch admiral's ship was blown up with all
hands. But it was Mulgrave who saw more active service than any
of them. At the age of seventeen, he was on board the ship which
prince Rupert and Albemarle jointly commanded against the
Dutch, and, when the war was brought to a close, he was given
a troop of horse to guard Dover. At the next outbreak of war, he
was again at sea with his kinsman, the earl of Ossory, on board
The Victory, when he chose, as Dryden says in a passage of un-
conscious humour, ‘to abandon those delights, to which his youth
and fortune did invite him, to undergo the hazards, and, which
was worse, the company of common seamen. And so bravely did
'
he bear himself that he was given the command of The Katharine,
the best of all the second rates. ' Nor was this the end of his
military career. He was presently colonel of the regiment of foot
which his own energy had raised, served for the sake of experience
under Schomberg and Turenne, and, finally, in 1680, went to the
relief of Tangier with two thousand men, and was triumphantly
successful.
There is thus a strong uniformity in the lives of the wits; and
poetry was even a closer bond between them than the service of
their king. They essayed the same tasks, they sang the same
tunes, each in accord with his own talent. They composed pro-
logues for their friends; they laid sacrilegious hands upon the
works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, which they changed to suit
the humour of the quality. They wrote songs in honour of
'
Corinna and Phyllis, Chloris and Olinda. /\ They delighted in an
insipidity of phrase which kept their passion harnessed to 'good
6
## p. 203 (#225) ############################################
The Mark of the Amateur 203
9
a
sense. ' | Only in satire did they give a free rein to their eager
antipathies and generous impulses. They played with the counters
of an outworn classicism, and attempted to pass off "Cupid,
'Bacchus' and the rest as the current coins of poetry. They
bowed the knee to the same masters, and believed that originality
consisted in the imitation of Horace and Boileau. Yet, for all
their study, they were, for the most part, amateurs. “Wit is a good
diversion but base trade,' said Sedley, and, with the exception of
Rochester, a born man of letters, not one of them had the power
of castigating his verses into perfection. It was not for these
happy triflers to con their manuscripts by day and night, to guard
them for ten years from the eager eye of the public. They threw
them off in their hours of ease, and did not make them proof
against the attack of time. They were precisians without being
precise. They followed those whom they considered the best
models. The Stagyrite is ever on their tongues, and if they could
they would have obeyed his laws. Their highest ambition was
to equal Horace. But they could not be at the pains to use his
file. It is the true mark of the amateur to begin a work as a
poet and to end it as a versifier. They had happy thoughts these
court poets; they hit upon ingenious images; an elegance of
phrase was not beyond their reach. What they found almost
impossible was to sustain the level of their inspiration. When
Sedley begins a song with the lines,
Love still has something of the sea,
From whence his mother rose,
you are reminded of the Greek anthology, and think you are in the
presence of a little masterpiece. But the poet soon loses interest
in his work, and relies upon the common words and familiar
metaphors of his day. Even at the third line, ‘No time his slaves
from doubt can free,' the illusion is dispelled. And it is this care-
lessness. characteristic of them all, which makes it difficult to
distinguish the works of one from another, and explains the many
false inscriptions, which perplex the reader. 'Lord Dorset and
Lord Rochester,' says Pope, 'should be considered as holiday-
writers, as gentlemen that diverted themselves now and then with
poetry, rather than as poets. ' From this condemnation, Rochester
must be excluded. His energy and concentration entitled him to
be judged by the highest standard. The others cannot resent a
wise and just sentence.
This union of poetry with the court had one evil result. It
involved literature in an atmosphere of coxcombry. Social
## p. 204 (#226) ############################################
204
The Court Poets
eminence appeared the very inspiration of Apollo. To deserve
the bays nothing was necessary save to be a person of honour.
All the resources of eloquent flattery were exhausted in the praise
of noblemen who condescended to poetry. Criticism was thus
poisoned at its source. A poet should be judged by his poetry
and by nothing else. The accidents of his life should not be
permitted to cloud our judgment. To find a peculiar virtue in a
courtier's verses is no better and no worse than to hail a farmer's
boy as a man of genius merely because he follows the plough.
And it is difficult to read the contemporary eulogies of Buckhurst,
Mulgrave and the rest with patience. Of course, the utmost
latitude may be granted to dedications. No writer is upon oath
when he addresses a dedicatory epistle to friend or patron, and if
only he content himself with making a panegyric of his patron's
character or person no harm is done, while a pleasant tradition is
observed. When, for instance, Sir Francis Fane assures Rochester
that, after his charming and most instructive conversation, he
' finds himself, not only a better poet, a better philosopher, but,
much more than these, a better Christian,' you smile, as, no doubt,
Rochester smiled at Sir Francis Fane's temerity and lack of
humour. You cannot smile when Dryden, who should have been
a king among them all, stoops to the very servitude of praise,
acclaiming in the language of extravagance not their graces, not
their gallantry, not their wit flung lightly across the table, but
their poetry. In thus honouring Buckhurst and Mulgrave, he dis-
honours the craft of which he was a faithful follower, and his
offence is less against humour than against truth. To confess at
the outset, as Dryden confesses, that the Court is the best and
surest judge of writing,' is a mere hyperbole, which may be
excused. His praise of Rochester, vague though it be, displays
all the vice of a false judgment.
Wit,' he writes, seems to have lodged itself more nobly in this age, than
in any of the former, and the people of my mean condition are only writers
because some of the nobility, and your Lordship in the first place, are above
the narrow praises which poesy could give you. '
The statement is abject in humility, yet still without pretence to
criticism. He goes furthest astray when he speaks of Buckhurst.
It is Buckhurst the poet, not Buckhurst the courtier, that he extols,
and thus, upon every line that he devotes to his friend, he lays
the foundation of error. He congratulates himself that he was
inspired to foretell Buckhurst to mankind, 'as the restorer of
poetry, the greatest genius, the truest judge, and the best patron. '
6
6
## p. 205 (#227) ############################################
Dryden's Flattery
205
6
Never for a moment does he hesitate to compare him with the
greatest He declares that Buckhurst forgives
the many failings of those, who, in their wretched art, cannot arrive to those
heights, that he possesses from a happy, abundant, and native genius: which
are as inborn to him, as they were to Shakespeare, or for aught I know, to
Homer.
So he sets him high above all living poets. “Your Lordship,' says
he, 'excels all others in all the several parts of poetry, which you
have undertaken to adorn. And, again: 'the most vain, and the
most ambitious of our age have. . . yielded the first place without
dispute. ' As his lyric poems are the delight and wonder of this
age,' so they will prove the envy of the next. ' And it is of satire
that he is the most perfect model. ' 'If I have not written better,
confesses Dryden, “it is because you have not written more. '
Finally, in a comparison of ancient and modern, he divides the
wreath of glory between Shakespeare and Buckhurst. “This age
and the last,' he declares, 'especially in England, have excelled the
ancients in both these kinds, and I would instance in Shakespeare
of the former, in your Lordship of the latter sort.
' What boots it,
after this eulogy, to call Buckhurst the king of poets? It would
have been legs mischievous to call him the king of men.
With the same recklessness of adulation, Dryden praises
Mulgrave's Essay of Poetry. He read it, he says, with much
delight, as much instruction and not without some envy. He
assures his patron that the anonymity of the work was 'not
altogether so fair, give me leave to say, as it was politic. ' The
motive was clear enough.
By concealing your quality,' writes Dryden, 'you might clearly understand
how your work succeeded, and that the general approbation was given to your
merit, not your title. Thus, like A pelles, you stood unseen behind your
own Venus, and received the praises of the passing multitude; the work was
commended, not the author; and I doubt not, this was one of the most
pleasing adventures of your life. '
It was not like Mulgrave to remain long in the dark, and the
adventure, if pleasing, was soon over. As for Dryden, he could
sink lower (or rise higher) even than this in the scale of adulation.
A couplet upon Mulgrave remains, his masterpiece of bathos:
How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear
His fame augmented by an English peer!
The poets themselves, being men of the world, knew what value
to put upon Dryden's panegyrics. The best of them, Rochester
and Buckhurst, treated their own poems with a lighthearted disdain.
## p. 206 (#228) ############################################
206
The Court Poets
They left others to gather up the flowers which they scattered with
a prodigal hand. If they are to be accounted artists, let it be
in life not in verse. Poetry was but an episode in their multi-
coloured careers; and, though we may wisely neglect the lives of
greater poets, with them, criticism inevitably becomes biography.
John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, the one man of undisputed genius
among them, will ever be memorable for the waywardness and
complexity of his character, for the vigour and energy of his verse.
Few poets have suffered more acutely than he from the flattery of
friends or the disdain of enemies. The lofty adulation offered at
his youthful shrine was soon turned to a violent malignity, and, in
the clash of opinions it is not easy to disengage the truth. He was
born in 1648 at Ditchley near Woodstock, the son of the pleasure-
loving, wary, ambitious Henry Wilmot who fought for his king,
and who, after Worcester, shared the wanderings and hardships
of Charles II. Educated 'in grammar learning' at Burford, in
Oxfordshire, he entered Wadham college in 1659, was created a
master of arts in 1661, at which time he, and none else, was ad-
mitted very affectionately into the fraternity, by a kiss on the left
cheek from the Chancellor of the University (Clarendon), who then
sate in the supreme chair to honour that Assembly. ' A veritable
child of the muses ‘he lisped in numbers. ' At the age of twelve, he
addressed a respectable copy of verses 'to his Sacred Majesty on
his Restoration, and mourned in English and Latin the death of
Mary, princess of Orange. Having taken his degree, he travelled
in France and Italy, and, at eighteen, returned to England and
the court, a finished scholar and an accomplished gentleman.
None of the courtiers who thronged Whitehall made so brilliant
an appearance as Rochester. All the gifts of nature were his.
'He was a graceful, well-shaped person,' says Burnet,'tall and well made.
He was exactly well-bred, and what by a modest behaviour natural to him,
what by a civility become almost as natural, his conversation was easy and
obliging:
a
He had a talent of intimacy and persuasiveness, which none could
resist. Even when his words lacked sincerity, they won the hearts
of his hearers.
Il entre dans vos goûts, said a woman, who was not in love with him, dans
tous vos sentiments ; et tandis qu'il ne dit pas un seul mot de ce qu'il pense,
il vous fait croire tout ce qu'il dit.
He gained an easy ascendancy over the court and assumed all the
freedoms of a chartered libertine. Once upon a time, as Pepys
## p. 207 (#229) ############################################
Rochester
207
<
1
tells us, he had a difference with Tom Killigrew, whose ear he
boxed in the presence of the king. This barbarous conduct, says
the diary,
do give such offence to the people here at court, to see how cheap the king
makes himself, and the more, for that the king hath not only passed by the
thing, and pardoned it to Rochester already, but this very morning the king
did publicly walk up and down, and Rochester I saw with him as free as erer
to the king's everlasting shame, to have so idle a rogue his companion.
Not even the people at court could for long harbour a feeling
of resentment against the insolence of Rochester. Charles himself
was ever ready with a pardon. Though he banished Rochester
many times from his presence, he as often recalled him. The truth
is that, in Burnet's words, the King loved his company for the
diversion it afforded him. ' Little as Charles appreciated the bitter
satires upon 'Old Rowley,' he could not but forgive the satirist.
Though Rochester professed a hatred of the court, it was the only
place in which his talents found a proper freedom, and he always
returned thither, so long as his health lasted. Nor was it only
the licence of his speech that involved him in disgrace. At nine-
teen, to repair the sole deficiency of his lot, he had seized upon
Mrs Mallett, a great beauty and a great fortune, 'by horse and
foot men,' put her 'into a coach with six horses, and two women
provided to receive her,' and carried her away. The king, who had
tried in vain to advance the match, was 'mighty angry,' and sent
Rochester to the Tower. But the triste héritière, as Gramont
calls her, did not long withstand the fierce suit of her lover, and
Rochester, as his letters show, made a reasonably fond husband.
Indeed, though after the adventure what most strongly attracted
him was the lady's fortune, he honourably repented of his greed,
and presently tells her that her money 'shall always be employed
for the use of herself and those dependent on her. . . so long as he
can get bread without it. '
Adventure, in truth, was the passion of his life. When he
could not seek it in the field of battle, he must find it perforce
in the tamer atmosphere of the court. He had a perfect genius
for disguise, and delighted to assume the likeness now of a porter
now of a beggar. Like the true histrion that he was, he neglected
no part of his craft, and entered into the very skin of the character
he chose to impersonate.
"Sometimes to follow some mean amou
ours,' says Burnet, which for the
vanity of them he affected, at other times merely for diversion, he would go
about in odd shapes, in which he acted his part so naturally, that even those
## p. 208 (#230) ############################################
208
The Court Poets
who were in the secret and saw him in these shapes could perceive nothing
by which he might be discovered! '
In one of his banishments, he and the duke of Buckingham, also in
disgrace, found an inn to let on the Newmarket road. Entering
into the joyous spirit of masquerade, they took the inn, and each
in turn played the part of landlord. Less with the purpose of
selling their ale than to get what sport they might out of the
ramble, they invited the whole countryside to frequent feasts, and
with the help of their neighbours, enacted a veritable comedy. At
last Rochester became enamoured of a wood-nymph, compared with
whom ‘Salmacis was not more charming,' and whom he visited in
the garb of an old gentlewoman, thus giving the court the matter
of not a little gossip, before the king, passing by that road to New-
market, took him into favour again. But his greatest exploit in
this kind was to set himself up in Tower street for a German (or
Italian) astrologer, who declared that he had discovered the pro-
foundest secrets of nature and promised infallible remedies for
every disease. His success in the city was immediate, and his fame
so quickly spread to the other end of the town that the courtiers
flocked to hear his eloquence and to profit by his wisdom. So well
contrived was his disguise, that his nearest friends did not know
him; and, as Hamilton tells us, but for an accident he would have
numbered Miss Jennings and Miss Price among his patients. None
knew better than he how to beat the drum and to urge the passers-
by into his booth. As Alexander Bendo, he put himself high above
'the bastard-race of quacks and cheats. He was ready to cure the
spleen and all the other ills of mankind. Above all, he declared
that he had learned in a long sojourn abroad how art assists
nature in the preservation of Beauty. Under his treatment women
of forty should bear the same countenance as girls of fifteen.
There was no miracle of embellishment that he would not under-
take. 'I will also preserve and cleanse your teeth,' he boasted,
white and round as pearls, fastening them that are loose. And
he did not underrate the benefits which he was ready to confer.
"Now should Galen himself look out of his grave,' said he, 'and tell me
these are baubles below the profession of a physician, I would boldly answer
him, that I take more glory in preserving God's image in its unblemished
beauty upon one good face, than I should do in patching up all the decay'd
carcases in the world. '
That is in the proper key of extravagance, and it is not wonderful
that courtiers and citizens alike sought out Alexander Bendo at
his lodgings in Tower street, next door to the sign of the Black
Swan.
## p. 209 (#231) ############################################
Rochester's Character
209
Thus it was that he spent the interludes of enforced exclusion
from court. Nothing could tame the ardent gaiety of his spirits,
or check his boisterous love of life and pleasure. His tireless wit
came to the aid of his inclination, and his deep knowledge of
literature made him welcome even among the serious. Like
Gramont, he sought joy everywhere, and carried it with him into
every company. His unwearied curiosity sustained him in the
most hazardous adventures and taught him how to make light of
the worst misfortunes. Burnet declares that he had conquered his
love of drink while upon his travels, and that, falling once more
into a society that practised every sort of excess, he was brought
back to it again. It is probable that no vast persuasion was
necessary. His constant disposition was toward gaiety and
mirth, and
'the natural bent of his fancy,' to quote Burnet's words, 'made him so ex-
travagantly pleasant, that many to be more diverted by that humor, studied to
engage him deeper and deeper in intemperance, which at length did so
entirely subdue him, that, as he told me, for five years together he was
continually drunk
When Burnet wrote these words, he desired, no doubt, to make the
worst of Rochester. The greater the sin was, the greater the con-
version. And thus it was that Rochester's vices became legendary,
that Rochester himself was chosen as an awful example of de-
moniacal passion, a kind of bogey to frighten children withal.
Yet far worse than his manifold intemperance, in the eyes of
his contemporaries, were his principles of morality and religion.
Evelyn found him a very profane wit,' and, doubtless, he took a
peculiar pleasure in shocking that amiable philosopher. Worse
than all, he was 'a perfect Hobbist,' and, upon his Hobbism, bis
glaring vices seemed but evanescent spots. He freely owned to
Burnet, with a smile, let us hope, that
though he talked of morality as a fine thing, yet this was only because he
thought it a decent way of speaking, and that as they went always in clothes
though in their frolics
they would have chosen sometimes to have gone naked,
if they had not feared the people, so though some of them found it necessary
for human life to talk of morality, yet he confessed they cared not for it.
As in prose, so in verse, Rochester delighted to outrage his critics.
Dryden charged him with self-sufficiency, and out of his mouth he
might have convicted him. Thus writes Rochester in An Epistolary
Essay:
Born to myself, I like myself alone;
And must conclude my Judgment good, or none :
For cou'd my Sense be nought, how shou'd I know
Whether another Man's were good or no.
14
E. L. VIII.
CH. VIII.
## p. 210 (#232) ############################################
210
The Court Poets
If then I'm happy, what does it advance
Whether to Merit due, or Arrogance ?
Oh, but the World will take Offence thereby!
Why then the World shall suffer for't, not I.
But it was not the world which suffered. It was Rochester. Like
all men who set out to astonish the citizen, to put the worst
possible construction upon his own words and acts, he saw his
self-denunciation accepted for simple truth. Even Dr Johnson
did not rise superior to the prejudice of Rochester's own con-
temporaries. He, too, thought that Rochester's intervals of study
were 'yet more criminal' than his course of drunken gaiety
and gross sensuality,' and thus proved how long endures the effect
of mystification
As has been said, it is difficult in the clash of opinions to
disengage the character of Rochester. Fort impie, fort ordurier
dans ses propos et ses écritssuch is Hamilton's judgment.
6
There has not livd in many Ages (if ever) so extraordinary, and I think I
may add so useful a Person, as most Englishmen know my Lord to have
been, whether we consider the constant good Sense, and the agreeable
Mirth of his ordinary Conversation, or the vast Reach and Compass of his
Invention
-80 says Wolseley, his loyal panegyrist. Somewhere between
these two extremes the truth will be found. Rochester was as
little 'useful' as he was fort impie, fort ordurier. He was a man,
not a monster, a man of genius, moreover, and, in his hours, a man
of rare simplicity and candour. A good friend, a kind, if fickle,
lover, he has left behind in his letters a better proof of his
character than either obloquy or eulogy affords. His correspond-
ence with Henry Savile does equal credit to them both. Rochester's
letters are touched with the sadness which underlay his mirth, yet,
what spirit is in them, what courage, even when he confesses him-
self almost blind, utterly lame, and scarce within the reasonable
Hope of ever seeing London again'l As sickness overtakes him,
he leans the more heavily on Savile's friendship.
‘Harry,' he writes, ''tis not the least of my Happiness, that I think you
love me; but the first of my pretensions is to make it appear, that I faith-
fully endeavour to deserve it. If there be a real good upon earth, 'tis
in the name of Friend, without which all others are fantastical. How few
of us are fit stuff to make that thing, we have daily the melancholy ex.
perience. '
His letters to his wife, moreover, exhibit us a Rochester that has
hitherto been obscured from view. Whimsical, humorous, ironic, he
9
## p. 211 (#233) ############################################
A Quarrel with Mulgrave 2II
appears in them also, but something else than the cynical hunter
after pleasure. He shows himself curious concerning the details
of household management. He discusses oats and coal, deplores
the want of ready cash, which is hard to come by, and hopes his
wife excuses him sending no money, 'for till I am well enough,' thus
he writes, 'to fetch it myself, they will not give me a farthing, and
if I had not pawn'd my plate I believe I must have starv'd in my
sickness. ' Here, indeed, is an unfamiliar Rochester, in dire straits
of poverty, pawning his plate to keep his restless soul within its
case, and nearer to the truth, perhaps, than the monster painted
in their blackest colours by anxious divines.
Two episodes in Rochester's career have involved him in
charges of dishonour, from one of which he cannot emerge with
credit. In both, Mulgrave was engaged, and it is easy to believe
that the antipathy which separated the two men was innate and
profound. When neither of them was of age, Mulgrave, being
informed that Rochester had said something malicious of him,
sent colonel Aston to call him to account. Rochester proved,
even to Mulgrave's satisfaction, that he had not used the words,
but Mulgrave thought himself compelled by the mere rumour to
prosecute the quarrel. He owned his persistence foolish, and
Rochester, as it was his part to choose, elected to fight on horse-
back. They met at Knightsbridge, and Rochester brought with
him not his expected second, but ‘an errant life-guards-man, whom
nobody knew. Aston objected to the second as an unsuitable
adversary, especially considering how well he was mounted. ' And,
in the end, they agreed to fight on foot. Whereon, Rochester
declared that ‘he had at first chosen to fight on horseback, because
he was so weak with a certain distemper, that he found himself
unfit to fight at all any way, much less on foot. Accordingly, no
fight took place, and Mulgrave's second lost no time in spreading
a report injurious to Rochester, upon whom henceforth was fostered
a reputation for cowardice. The charge is not fully sustained.
Rochester, it seems, was too weak to fight a-foot, Mulgrave objected
to fight on horseback, being worse mounted. A little ingenuity
might have turned the blame on either side, and Mulgrave, by
his own confession, was persisting in a quarrel which had no
justification. But Rochester, with his customary cynicism, shrugged
his shoulders, and replied to the charge of cowardice with a famous
couplet:
Merely for safety, after Fame they thirst,
For all men would be Cowards if they durst.
14_2
## p. 212 (#234) ############################################
2 1 2
The Court Poets
The origin of his quarrel with Dryden is by no means creditable
to his honour or his generosity.
'He had a particular pique to him, says Saint-Évremond, after his mighty
success in the Town, either because he was sensible, that he deserved not that
applause for his Tragedies, which the mad, unthinking audience gave him,. . .
or out of indignation of having any rival in reputation. '
Whatever might be the cause of Rochester's malice, its effect was to
set up Crowne in opposition to Dryden, a piece of impudence which
nothing but Rochester's influence at court could have carried off.
And no sooner had Crowne enjoyed his unwarranted success than
Rochester withdrew his favour, 'as if he would still be in contra-
diction with the Town, and in that,' says Saint-Évremond with un-
contested truth, 'he was generally in the right, for of all Audiences
in polite Nations, perhaps there is not one which judges so very
falsely of the drama. With this piece of injustice Rochester was
not content. If he had been, An Essay on Satire soon gave him,
as he thought, another ground of anger. That he should have
attributed this piece of weak and violent spite to Dryden speaks
ill of his criticism. He might have discerned the hand of Mulgrave
in every line. Perhaps he believed them accomplices. At any rate,
as Dryden was going home one night from Will's to his lodging,
he was waylaid by a pack of ruffians and soundly beaten. There
is no doubt that Rochester was guilty of the outrage. His guilt
stands confessed in a letter to Savile. "You write me word,' says
he, 'that I am out of favour with a certain poet. . . . If he fall on
me at the Blunt, which is his very good Weapon in Wit, I will
forgive if you please, and leave the Repartee to Black Will, with a
Cudgel. ' The punishment he meted out to Mulgrave was better
deserved, and delivered in verse. As for Dryden, whose genius, as
whose age, should have protected him, he passed by Rochester
with a single reference. ‘An author of your own quality, whose
ashes I will not disturb,' he wrote to Buckhurst, with a magnanimity
which, even at this distance of time, it is hard to condone.
At the age of thirty-one, Rochester died, his wild oats sown,
and his mind turned to ampler purposes. Though his cynical
temper was still unconquered, his wit began 'to frame and fashion
itself to public business. As one of his friends tells us, he was
‘informing himself of the Wisdom of our Laws and the excellent
Constitution of the English Government, and spoke in the House
of Peers with general Approbation. ' That he would ever have
grown into a statesman is unlikely. The scandal of his life had
destroyed his authority. Besides, he was a poet, to whom politics
## p. 213 (#235) ############################################
Rochester's Writings
213
would ever have seemed a base trade. What he did for the solace of
his reputation was to make an edifying end, and to prove a chance
of exhortation to two divines. That these worthy men made him
out rather worse than he was is probable. Burnet, at any rate,
told us something of him by the way and set forth his views with
impartiality. So much may not be said of the Rev. Robert
Parsons, who merely handed him over, as an inverted hero, to the
authors of the chapbooks.
Such was the life and death of one who set forth his character
in his writings with the utmost candour. Though he was never
at the pains to gather together his flying sheets, though he is said
on his deathbed, one hopes falsely, to have desired the destruction
of his poems, it is his poems which still give us the true measure
of his genius. Yet, even here, misunderstanding has pursued him.
The worst that he wrote has been acclaimed to be the best.
Johnson declares that the strongest effort of his muse is his poem
entitled Nothing', a piece of ingenuity, unworthy his talent Still
more foolish has been the common assumption that Rochester's
poems are unfit to be read. In some few, he reached a height of
outspoken cynicism rarely scaled by an English poet. But the
most of his works may be studied without fear, and judged upon
their very high merits. Tonson's collection contains more than 200
pages, and amply justifies the claim, made for it by Rymer, that it
consists of such pieces only as may be received in a virtuous court,
and not unbecome the Cabinet of the severest Matron. '
It was in satire above all that Rochester excelled. For this
kind, he was richly endowed by nature and art. He had studied
the ancient models with constancy and understanding. The
quenchless vigour of his mind found its best expression in cas-
tigating the vices and foibles of humankind, which he knew so
well. His daring and malice equalled his vigour, and he attacked
Charles II, the Royal Angler, or Nelly, the reigning favourite, with as
light a heart as he brought to the demolition of Sir Car Scroop, the
purblind knight. He wrote the heroic couplet with a life and
freedom that few have excelled, and the most that can be said in his
dispraise is that, like the rest of the courtiers, he knew not the use
of the file. 'Rochester,' said Andrew Marvell, with the voice not
of flattery but of criticism, 'is the only man in England who has
1 Nothing as a theme was long a commonplace. Johnson compares with Rochester's
verses Passerat’s Latin poem Nihil (1567). Two years before Passerat, Sir Edward
Dyer had written a tract in prose, The Prayer of Nothing, which had suggested a popular
broadside, with the same title, printed in J. P. Collier's Book of Roxburghe Ballads (1847).
## p. 214 (#236) ############################################
214
The Court Poets
8
the true vein of Satire,' and Marvell, in speaking of satire, spoke
of an art which he himself had practised with success. And that
Rochester looked upon satire as an art is evident from the answer,
which he gave to Burnet, who objected that revenge and false-
hood were its blemishes.
'A man,' said he could not write with life, unless he were heated with
Revenge, for to make a Satire without Resentments, upon the cold Notions of
Philosophy, was as if a man would in cold blood cut men's throats, who had
never offended him. And he said, the lyes in these Libels came often in as
ornaments that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the Poem. '
| His masterpiece, without doubt, is A Satire against Mankind.
Imitated from Boileau, it bears in every line the impress of
Rochester's mind. The energy of its thought and style separates
it sharply from its original, and, if you compare the two works, you
may find a clue to the difference between French and English.
The one is marked by order, moderation, and good sense. The
other moves impetuous like a torrent, and sweeps out of its way
the prejudices of all time.
Rowe's solitary comedy, The Biter, produced in 1705, was a
failure. According to Johnson, the author's applause was the
only sound of approval heard in the theatre at its production.
It was succeeded by the tragedy Ulysses (1706), a tedious and
ineffective drama which lacks Rowe's usual strong appeal to the
pity of his audience. Neither this play nor The Royal Convert
(1707)very dull, with a background of mythical British history,
calls for special comment. Rowe's last two plays bear a strong
likeness to one another. The Tragedy of Jane Shore 'in imita-
tion of Shakespeare's style,' produced in 1714, has been said to bear
no closer resemblance to Shakespeare than is to be found in the
fact that like some of his plays it is based upon an episode in the
history of England. It is, however, a good acting play, which,
even now, has not entirely disappeared from the stage. It af-
forded Mrs Siddons one of her most tremendous opportunities for
realistic acting. As Jane Shore, drifting half-starved about the
streets of London, eye-witnesses report that the audience 'abso-
lutely thought her the creature perishing through want'-and
'could not avoid turning from the suffering object. '
In the following year (1715), Rowe succeeded Tate as poet
laureate and produced his last play, The Tragedy of the Lady
Jane Gray. This play, as well as its predecessor, and, to some
extent, Rowe's other dramatic works, display a certain nobility of
outlook and purity of purpose, in marked and refreshing contrast
1 Among the most interesting revivals were those by Garrick in 1743 and 1746,
when he played Lothario, and those of 1782 and subsequent years when Mrs Siddons,
as Calista, electrified her audiences, particularly in the scene with Horatio in the third
act, where he accuses her of being false to her husband and his friend, Altamont. In
1803, a revival of the play took place, when the cast included Mrs Siddons and both
the Kemble brothers.
## p. 197 (#219) ############################################
Nicholas Rowe
197
to the pruriency in which the English drama bad for half a
century been steeped. The unexceptionably moral and patriotic
tone of Rowe's last play, as well as its protestant spirit, affords a
very striking proof of the change that had come over the English
stage since the revolution and the publication of Jeremy Collier's
Short View.
.
Like Otway, Rowe attempted to move his audiences to pity
and terror; but, with few exceptions, his dramas leave us cold
and unmoved. He contrives situations with considerable skill,
but he generally fails to make his characters rise to them; nor do
they give vent to their feelings in language which is always either
touching in itself, or suitable to the surrounding circumstances.
His plays are the calm and finished performances of an author
who felt but faintly the emotions which he sought to portray, and
who, by the introduction of what he very aptly calls 'the pomp of
horror,' hoped to find his way to the feelings of his readers.
Criticism and the public taste, in fact, have alike moved far since
Johnson wrote of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, 'There is scarcely
any work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so
delightful by the language. ' He has, however, other claims to
the respect of posterity. Of the significance of his edition of
Shakespeare's works (1709), something has been said in an earlier
volume? ; while his translation of Lucan's Pharsalia, which was
first published as a whole in 1718 (shortly after his death), and
of which at least nine editions appeared between that date and
1822, is, probably, at the present day, his least forgotten work.
He also translated in verse Boileau's Lutrin (1708). Rowe was
an accomplished modern, as well as classical, scholar, and his
personality is one of dignity, as well as of interest, in the history
of English literature.
* See vol. V, chap. XI, pp. 267—8.
## p. 198 (#220) ############################################
CHAPTER VIII
THE COURT POETS
6
THE career of the Court Poets is an episode not merely in the
history of literature but in the history of manners. In their lives
as in their art, they were an outspoken protest against the domina-
tion of the puritans. Whatever their predecessors in their stern
morality had disdained, they pursued with a rare fervency of spirit.
The chief end of their ambition was to catch pleasure on the wing,
and they gave to pleasure a liberal interpretation. Gallantry was
not enough for them. No courtier could hope to win the approval
of his sovereign who had not given proof of his wit,' who had not
publicly burned incense before the muse of frivolity. So it came
about that, in Sedley's phrase, 'every fop wrote songs,' that few
refrained from libelling their friends in satire, and that a freedom
in written, as in spoken, speech matched the prevailing freedom of
thought and conduct
The court, in brief, cherished an ideal hitherto strange to
English austerity. It no longer took a keen interest in rival policies.
The bitter conflict of the civil war, followed by the domination of
Oliver, had obscured the spark of patriotism which burned only
in a few loyal hearts. The king and his courtiers were determined
to amuse themselves. They had learned in Paris how to temper
their magnificence with wit and politesse, and, in the glamour of
beauty and courage, they forgot the long, dark days when all
the decorative arts of life had been banished, when even the smile
of irony was deemed a disgrace. Charles II, a monarch to whom
most things were easy save wisdom, led the band of revellers,
preferred the ribaldry of Buckhurst and Sedley to the grave advice
of Arlington, sauntered away his days in the society of his
mistresses, and delighted in satire, even though it was directed
against himself. It was a golden age, truly, in which life seemed
desirable for its own sake, and in which nobody thought of its
drearier purpose.
Les plus honnêtes gens du monde, says
## p. 199 (#221) ############################################
The Circle of Whitehall 199
Saint-Évremond, ce sont les Français qui pensent, et les Anglais
qui parlent. And at Whitehall, which he graced by his presence
for many years, he might have encountered them both.
Such is one side of the medal. The reverse is less attractive.
If it were frivolity whose muse reigned in Whitehall, it was a
pompous frivolity. There was very little spontaneous gaiety in the
court of the returned king. The intention to be gay was so loudly
expressed that it seemed to come from the head rather than from
the heart. The sense of relief, the determination to be happy at
all costs, suggest that a spice of malice flavoured the joyousness of
the courtiers. In what they said and did there was no trace of the
golden mean. Their merriment was too often the merriment of
constraint. Rochester declares in one of his letters that it wasn't
safe for a man to leave the court, if he didn't want to be hanged.
The exploits set forth in the Mémoires de Gramont, are, so to say,
conscious of reaction. Their persistent monotony fatigues us who
read of them, as perchance they fatigued the courtiers who are
their heroes. The king and his friends were too flagrantly
industrious in the pursuit of pleasure. Gramont himself was not
content to rely upon his own graces for success. He wooed his
goddesses with 'gloves, pocket looking-glasses, elegant boxes,
apricot paste, essences, and other small wares of love. ' To be
jealous without being in love, to play for stakes so high that they
could not be paid without distress, to indulge in practical jokes
which had no better excuse than physical infirmity—these are not
the marks of happiness. They were the misfortunes of everyone
who came within the circle of Whitehall. The manners of the
time thus proved the best material for satire and comedy. There
was, perhaps, more joy in their contemplation than in their exercise.
Pepys, who lived on the fringe of the Court, was gay, because he
carried his indomitable gaiety into the simplest affairs of his life.
We can believe that there was a flash of genuine gaiety at Epsom,
when Nell Gwynn and Buckhurst ‘kept mery house' there. But
the pleasure of Charles II's court was marred by the inverse of
puritanism. It was austere even in its love-making.
At times, the courtiers broke through all the bonds of restraint.
They thought it no shame to commit acts of violence in the streets.
Once upon a time, Buckhurst and his friends killed a tanner at
Stoke Newington whom they suspected of theft, and whose pockets
they emptied, as of stolen goods. A far worse scandal was caused
by Sir Charles Sedley's amazing apparition at Oxford Kate's in
Bow street. He came in open day, as Pepys tells us,
## p. 200 (#222) ############################################
200
The Court Poets
into the Balconie and showed his nakedness. . . and abusing of scripture and
as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit,
saying that there he had to sell such a powder as should make all the women
run after him, 1,000 people standing underneath to see and hear him, and
that being done he took a glass of wine, and drank it off, and then took
another and drank the King's health.
It is not surprising that the unbridled conduct of Sir Charles
Sedley and of Buckhurst, who was of the company, came near to
causing a riot, brought the offenders before the court, and received
from the lord chief justice 'a most high reproof. ' The news of
these pranks, moreover, went abroad, and lost nothing, we may be
sure, in the telling. The voice of scandal was noisy and unscrupu-
lous, then as now; and, though it is evident that the 'wits' were
not innocent of brutality, it is unfair to judge all their lives by one
or two episodes. Hasty generalisation is ever the foe of truth, and
charges are more lightly made than refuted. No man, for instance,
was ever so careless of his reputation as Rochester, and even he
protests in a letter addressed to Savile against an unfounded
indictment. Accused of the same folly as that of which Sedley
and Buckhurst were guilty, he was eager in excuse.
'For the hideous deportment,' he writes, which you have heard of, concern-
ing running naked, so much is true, that we went into the river somewhat
late in the year, and had a frisk for forty yards in a meadow, to dry ourselves. '
The trivial adventure was instantly turned to his disgrace, and so
deeply sensible was he of the public contempt that he confessed
himself 'extremely revived at the receipt of a kind letter from an
old friend. ' 'I ever thought you an extraordinary man,' says he,
and must now think you such a friend, who, being a courtier, as
you are, can love a man, whom it is the great mode to hate. '
Nor was exaggeration the only foe of the wits. Many there
were, without a spark of talent, who imitated the vices of Rochester
and Sedley, and who, by their senseless extravagance, brought their
betters into contempt. When wit became a fashion, the fools
could ape it, and the poets have been compelled ever since to bear a
weight of unmerited odium. Pepys once strayed into the society of
these pretenders, and their talk made even his hard heart ache.
‘But, Lord! what cursed loose company was this,' says he, that I was
in to-night, though full of wit; and worth a man's being in once to
know the nature of it, and their manner of talk, and lives. ' Pepys's
curiosity no doubt got the better of his judgment, and the wit of
these men, who called themselves the 'Ballers,' was probably as
false as their pretence. They are memorable only because they did
the poets an injustice-an injustice which no less a man than
## p. 201 (#223) ############################################
Men of Action
201
Dryden has removed. None knew better than he their talents and
their lives, and he treated them as true Augustans, praising their
eruditam voluptatem.
“We have,' said he, like the poets of the Horatian age, our genial nights,
when our discourse is neither too serious nor too light, but always pleasant,
and for the most part instructive; the raillery neither too sharp upon the
present, nor too censorious on the absent, and the cups only such as will raise
the conversation of the night, without disturbing the business of the morrow. '
As in duty bound, he who had been admitted to these banquets of
wit and sense defended them against the detraction of pedants.
The wits, said he, were insulted by those who knew them not.
'As we draw giants and anthropophagi. '—to cite his words in those vacan-
cies of our maps, where we have not travelled to discover better, so those
wretches paint lewdness, atheism, folly, ill-reasoning, and all manner of
extravagances amongst us, for want of knowing what we are. '
It was not difficult to rebut precise charges. The wits, described
by the ignorant, were the fops whom Dryden and his friends
banished. As for blasphemy and atheism, even if they were not
ill manners, they were worn threadbare. In other words, the true
wits are blamed for the excesses of those who had never tasted the
waters of Helicon.
If the court poets needed a defence, they could not have
found a wiser, juster defence than Dryden's. But even when they
have been relieved of the crimes of which others were guilty, there
is another misunderstanding which should be dispelled. The
brutalities of Rochester, Buckhurst and Sedley were the brutalities
of a fierce, unscrupulous youth, and mere incidents in long and
honourable careers. To pretend that these courtiers carried their
pranks into a ripe old age is to endow them with perpetual strength
and high spirits. Rochester, it is true, died on the very threshold
of middle life. The rest grew sober with the years. Buckhurst
was presently transformed into a grave and taciturn man, well
versed in affairs, and entrusted, in William III's absence, with the
regency of the kingdom. Sedley, too, turned politician, was guilty
of 'reflections on our late proceedings and delivered speeches
upon ways and means. In brief, the court poets were like those
who, in other times, shared their talent and temperament. They
seized life with both hands, and wrung from it at each stage
whatever of varying ease and pleasure it held.
And they were men of action as well as men of letters. There
was scarcely one of them that had not taken arms in the service of
their country. They proved their gallantry on the field of battle
as on the field of love. In later years, a charge of cowardice was
## p. 202 (#224) ############################################
202
The Court Poets
brought against Rochester. The bravery of his youth is beyond
dispute. He was but seventeen when he went to sea with Lord
Sandwich, and, on board The Revenge, took part in the famous
attack upon Bergen, where the Dutch ships had taken refuge.
Of this action he left a spirited account in a letter addressed to his
mother. A year later he was in the great sea fight, serving under
Sir Edward Spragge, and there gave a signal proof of his courage.
During the action,' says Burnet, Sir Edward Spragge, not being satisfied
with the behaviour of one of the Captains, could not easily find a Person, that
would cheerfully venture through so much danger, to carry his commands to
that captain. This Lord offered himself to the service, and went in a little
boat through all the shot, and delivered his message, and returned back to
Sir Edward: which was much commended by all that saw it. '
Buckhurst was not a whit behind Rochester in courage; he was
present, a volunteer, on the duke of York's ship in the battle of
3 June 1665, when the Dutch admiral's ship was blown up with all
hands. But it was Mulgrave who saw more active service than any
of them. At the age of seventeen, he was on board the ship which
prince Rupert and Albemarle jointly commanded against the
Dutch, and, when the war was brought to a close, he was given
a troop of horse to guard Dover. At the next outbreak of war, he
was again at sea with his kinsman, the earl of Ossory, on board
The Victory, when he chose, as Dryden says in a passage of un-
conscious humour, ‘to abandon those delights, to which his youth
and fortune did invite him, to undergo the hazards, and, which
was worse, the company of common seamen. And so bravely did
'
he bear himself that he was given the command of The Katharine,
the best of all the second rates. ' Nor was this the end of his
military career. He was presently colonel of the regiment of foot
which his own energy had raised, served for the sake of experience
under Schomberg and Turenne, and, finally, in 1680, went to the
relief of Tangier with two thousand men, and was triumphantly
successful.
There is thus a strong uniformity in the lives of the wits; and
poetry was even a closer bond between them than the service of
their king. They essayed the same tasks, they sang the same
tunes, each in accord with his own talent. They composed pro-
logues for their friends; they laid sacrilegious hands upon the
works of Shakespeare and Fletcher, which they changed to suit
the humour of the quality. They wrote songs in honour of
'
Corinna and Phyllis, Chloris and Olinda. /\ They delighted in an
insipidity of phrase which kept their passion harnessed to 'good
6
## p. 203 (#225) ############################################
The Mark of the Amateur 203
9
a
sense. ' | Only in satire did they give a free rein to their eager
antipathies and generous impulses. They played with the counters
of an outworn classicism, and attempted to pass off "Cupid,
'Bacchus' and the rest as the current coins of poetry. They
bowed the knee to the same masters, and believed that originality
consisted in the imitation of Horace and Boileau. Yet, for all
their study, they were, for the most part, amateurs. “Wit is a good
diversion but base trade,' said Sedley, and, with the exception of
Rochester, a born man of letters, not one of them had the power
of castigating his verses into perfection. It was not for these
happy triflers to con their manuscripts by day and night, to guard
them for ten years from the eager eye of the public. They threw
them off in their hours of ease, and did not make them proof
against the attack of time. They were precisians without being
precise. They followed those whom they considered the best
models. The Stagyrite is ever on their tongues, and if they could
they would have obeyed his laws. Their highest ambition was
to equal Horace. But they could not be at the pains to use his
file. It is the true mark of the amateur to begin a work as a
poet and to end it as a versifier. They had happy thoughts these
court poets; they hit upon ingenious images; an elegance of
phrase was not beyond their reach. What they found almost
impossible was to sustain the level of their inspiration. When
Sedley begins a song with the lines,
Love still has something of the sea,
From whence his mother rose,
you are reminded of the Greek anthology, and think you are in the
presence of a little masterpiece. But the poet soon loses interest
in his work, and relies upon the common words and familiar
metaphors of his day. Even at the third line, ‘No time his slaves
from doubt can free,' the illusion is dispelled. And it is this care-
lessness. characteristic of them all, which makes it difficult to
distinguish the works of one from another, and explains the many
false inscriptions, which perplex the reader. 'Lord Dorset and
Lord Rochester,' says Pope, 'should be considered as holiday-
writers, as gentlemen that diverted themselves now and then with
poetry, rather than as poets. ' From this condemnation, Rochester
must be excluded. His energy and concentration entitled him to
be judged by the highest standard. The others cannot resent a
wise and just sentence.
This union of poetry with the court had one evil result. It
involved literature in an atmosphere of coxcombry. Social
## p. 204 (#226) ############################################
204
The Court Poets
eminence appeared the very inspiration of Apollo. To deserve
the bays nothing was necessary save to be a person of honour.
All the resources of eloquent flattery were exhausted in the praise
of noblemen who condescended to poetry. Criticism was thus
poisoned at its source. A poet should be judged by his poetry
and by nothing else. The accidents of his life should not be
permitted to cloud our judgment. To find a peculiar virtue in a
courtier's verses is no better and no worse than to hail a farmer's
boy as a man of genius merely because he follows the plough.
And it is difficult to read the contemporary eulogies of Buckhurst,
Mulgrave and the rest with patience. Of course, the utmost
latitude may be granted to dedications. No writer is upon oath
when he addresses a dedicatory epistle to friend or patron, and if
only he content himself with making a panegyric of his patron's
character or person no harm is done, while a pleasant tradition is
observed. When, for instance, Sir Francis Fane assures Rochester
that, after his charming and most instructive conversation, he
' finds himself, not only a better poet, a better philosopher, but,
much more than these, a better Christian,' you smile, as, no doubt,
Rochester smiled at Sir Francis Fane's temerity and lack of
humour. You cannot smile when Dryden, who should have been
a king among them all, stoops to the very servitude of praise,
acclaiming in the language of extravagance not their graces, not
their gallantry, not their wit flung lightly across the table, but
their poetry. In thus honouring Buckhurst and Mulgrave, he dis-
honours the craft of which he was a faithful follower, and his
offence is less against humour than against truth. To confess at
the outset, as Dryden confesses, that the Court is the best and
surest judge of writing,' is a mere hyperbole, which may be
excused. His praise of Rochester, vague though it be, displays
all the vice of a false judgment.
Wit,' he writes, seems to have lodged itself more nobly in this age, than
in any of the former, and the people of my mean condition are only writers
because some of the nobility, and your Lordship in the first place, are above
the narrow praises which poesy could give you. '
The statement is abject in humility, yet still without pretence to
criticism. He goes furthest astray when he speaks of Buckhurst.
It is Buckhurst the poet, not Buckhurst the courtier, that he extols,
and thus, upon every line that he devotes to his friend, he lays
the foundation of error. He congratulates himself that he was
inspired to foretell Buckhurst to mankind, 'as the restorer of
poetry, the greatest genius, the truest judge, and the best patron. '
6
6
## p. 205 (#227) ############################################
Dryden's Flattery
205
6
Never for a moment does he hesitate to compare him with the
greatest He declares that Buckhurst forgives
the many failings of those, who, in their wretched art, cannot arrive to those
heights, that he possesses from a happy, abundant, and native genius: which
are as inborn to him, as they were to Shakespeare, or for aught I know, to
Homer.
So he sets him high above all living poets. “Your Lordship,' says
he, 'excels all others in all the several parts of poetry, which you
have undertaken to adorn. And, again: 'the most vain, and the
most ambitious of our age have. . . yielded the first place without
dispute. ' As his lyric poems are the delight and wonder of this
age,' so they will prove the envy of the next. ' And it is of satire
that he is the most perfect model. ' 'If I have not written better,
confesses Dryden, “it is because you have not written more. '
Finally, in a comparison of ancient and modern, he divides the
wreath of glory between Shakespeare and Buckhurst. “This age
and the last,' he declares, 'especially in England, have excelled the
ancients in both these kinds, and I would instance in Shakespeare
of the former, in your Lordship of the latter sort.
' What boots it,
after this eulogy, to call Buckhurst the king of poets? It would
have been legs mischievous to call him the king of men.
With the same recklessness of adulation, Dryden praises
Mulgrave's Essay of Poetry. He read it, he says, with much
delight, as much instruction and not without some envy. He
assures his patron that the anonymity of the work was 'not
altogether so fair, give me leave to say, as it was politic. ' The
motive was clear enough.
By concealing your quality,' writes Dryden, 'you might clearly understand
how your work succeeded, and that the general approbation was given to your
merit, not your title. Thus, like A pelles, you stood unseen behind your
own Venus, and received the praises of the passing multitude; the work was
commended, not the author; and I doubt not, this was one of the most
pleasing adventures of your life. '
It was not like Mulgrave to remain long in the dark, and the
adventure, if pleasing, was soon over. As for Dryden, he could
sink lower (or rise higher) even than this in the scale of adulation.
A couplet upon Mulgrave remains, his masterpiece of bathos:
How will sweet Ovid's ghost be pleased to hear
His fame augmented by an English peer!
The poets themselves, being men of the world, knew what value
to put upon Dryden's panegyrics. The best of them, Rochester
and Buckhurst, treated their own poems with a lighthearted disdain.
## p. 206 (#228) ############################################
206
The Court Poets
They left others to gather up the flowers which they scattered with
a prodigal hand. If they are to be accounted artists, let it be
in life not in verse. Poetry was but an episode in their multi-
coloured careers; and, though we may wisely neglect the lives of
greater poets, with them, criticism inevitably becomes biography.
John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, the one man of undisputed genius
among them, will ever be memorable for the waywardness and
complexity of his character, for the vigour and energy of his verse.
Few poets have suffered more acutely than he from the flattery of
friends or the disdain of enemies. The lofty adulation offered at
his youthful shrine was soon turned to a violent malignity, and, in
the clash of opinions it is not easy to disengage the truth. He was
born in 1648 at Ditchley near Woodstock, the son of the pleasure-
loving, wary, ambitious Henry Wilmot who fought for his king,
and who, after Worcester, shared the wanderings and hardships
of Charles II. Educated 'in grammar learning' at Burford, in
Oxfordshire, he entered Wadham college in 1659, was created a
master of arts in 1661, at which time he, and none else, was ad-
mitted very affectionately into the fraternity, by a kiss on the left
cheek from the Chancellor of the University (Clarendon), who then
sate in the supreme chair to honour that Assembly. ' A veritable
child of the muses ‘he lisped in numbers. ' At the age of twelve, he
addressed a respectable copy of verses 'to his Sacred Majesty on
his Restoration, and mourned in English and Latin the death of
Mary, princess of Orange. Having taken his degree, he travelled
in France and Italy, and, at eighteen, returned to England and
the court, a finished scholar and an accomplished gentleman.
None of the courtiers who thronged Whitehall made so brilliant
an appearance as Rochester. All the gifts of nature were his.
'He was a graceful, well-shaped person,' says Burnet,'tall and well made.
He was exactly well-bred, and what by a modest behaviour natural to him,
what by a civility become almost as natural, his conversation was easy and
obliging:
a
He had a talent of intimacy and persuasiveness, which none could
resist. Even when his words lacked sincerity, they won the hearts
of his hearers.
Il entre dans vos goûts, said a woman, who was not in love with him, dans
tous vos sentiments ; et tandis qu'il ne dit pas un seul mot de ce qu'il pense,
il vous fait croire tout ce qu'il dit.
He gained an easy ascendancy over the court and assumed all the
freedoms of a chartered libertine. Once upon a time, as Pepys
## p. 207 (#229) ############################################
Rochester
207
<
1
tells us, he had a difference with Tom Killigrew, whose ear he
boxed in the presence of the king. This barbarous conduct, says
the diary,
do give such offence to the people here at court, to see how cheap the king
makes himself, and the more, for that the king hath not only passed by the
thing, and pardoned it to Rochester already, but this very morning the king
did publicly walk up and down, and Rochester I saw with him as free as erer
to the king's everlasting shame, to have so idle a rogue his companion.
Not even the people at court could for long harbour a feeling
of resentment against the insolence of Rochester. Charles himself
was ever ready with a pardon. Though he banished Rochester
many times from his presence, he as often recalled him. The truth
is that, in Burnet's words, the King loved his company for the
diversion it afforded him. ' Little as Charles appreciated the bitter
satires upon 'Old Rowley,' he could not but forgive the satirist.
Though Rochester professed a hatred of the court, it was the only
place in which his talents found a proper freedom, and he always
returned thither, so long as his health lasted. Nor was it only
the licence of his speech that involved him in disgrace. At nine-
teen, to repair the sole deficiency of his lot, he had seized upon
Mrs Mallett, a great beauty and a great fortune, 'by horse and
foot men,' put her 'into a coach with six horses, and two women
provided to receive her,' and carried her away. The king, who had
tried in vain to advance the match, was 'mighty angry,' and sent
Rochester to the Tower. But the triste héritière, as Gramont
calls her, did not long withstand the fierce suit of her lover, and
Rochester, as his letters show, made a reasonably fond husband.
Indeed, though after the adventure what most strongly attracted
him was the lady's fortune, he honourably repented of his greed,
and presently tells her that her money 'shall always be employed
for the use of herself and those dependent on her. . . so long as he
can get bread without it. '
Adventure, in truth, was the passion of his life. When he
could not seek it in the field of battle, he must find it perforce
in the tamer atmosphere of the court. He had a perfect genius
for disguise, and delighted to assume the likeness now of a porter
now of a beggar. Like the true histrion that he was, he neglected
no part of his craft, and entered into the very skin of the character
he chose to impersonate.
"Sometimes to follow some mean amou
ours,' says Burnet, which for the
vanity of them he affected, at other times merely for diversion, he would go
about in odd shapes, in which he acted his part so naturally, that even those
## p. 208 (#230) ############################################
208
The Court Poets
who were in the secret and saw him in these shapes could perceive nothing
by which he might be discovered! '
In one of his banishments, he and the duke of Buckingham, also in
disgrace, found an inn to let on the Newmarket road. Entering
into the joyous spirit of masquerade, they took the inn, and each
in turn played the part of landlord. Less with the purpose of
selling their ale than to get what sport they might out of the
ramble, they invited the whole countryside to frequent feasts, and
with the help of their neighbours, enacted a veritable comedy. At
last Rochester became enamoured of a wood-nymph, compared with
whom ‘Salmacis was not more charming,' and whom he visited in
the garb of an old gentlewoman, thus giving the court the matter
of not a little gossip, before the king, passing by that road to New-
market, took him into favour again. But his greatest exploit in
this kind was to set himself up in Tower street for a German (or
Italian) astrologer, who declared that he had discovered the pro-
foundest secrets of nature and promised infallible remedies for
every disease. His success in the city was immediate, and his fame
so quickly spread to the other end of the town that the courtiers
flocked to hear his eloquence and to profit by his wisdom. So well
contrived was his disguise, that his nearest friends did not know
him; and, as Hamilton tells us, but for an accident he would have
numbered Miss Jennings and Miss Price among his patients. None
knew better than he how to beat the drum and to urge the passers-
by into his booth. As Alexander Bendo, he put himself high above
'the bastard-race of quacks and cheats. He was ready to cure the
spleen and all the other ills of mankind. Above all, he declared
that he had learned in a long sojourn abroad how art assists
nature in the preservation of Beauty. Under his treatment women
of forty should bear the same countenance as girls of fifteen.
There was no miracle of embellishment that he would not under-
take. 'I will also preserve and cleanse your teeth,' he boasted,
white and round as pearls, fastening them that are loose. And
he did not underrate the benefits which he was ready to confer.
"Now should Galen himself look out of his grave,' said he, 'and tell me
these are baubles below the profession of a physician, I would boldly answer
him, that I take more glory in preserving God's image in its unblemished
beauty upon one good face, than I should do in patching up all the decay'd
carcases in the world. '
That is in the proper key of extravagance, and it is not wonderful
that courtiers and citizens alike sought out Alexander Bendo at
his lodgings in Tower street, next door to the sign of the Black
Swan.
## p. 209 (#231) ############################################
Rochester's Character
209
Thus it was that he spent the interludes of enforced exclusion
from court. Nothing could tame the ardent gaiety of his spirits,
or check his boisterous love of life and pleasure. His tireless wit
came to the aid of his inclination, and his deep knowledge of
literature made him welcome even among the serious. Like
Gramont, he sought joy everywhere, and carried it with him into
every company. His unwearied curiosity sustained him in the
most hazardous adventures and taught him how to make light of
the worst misfortunes. Burnet declares that he had conquered his
love of drink while upon his travels, and that, falling once more
into a society that practised every sort of excess, he was brought
back to it again. It is probable that no vast persuasion was
necessary. His constant disposition was toward gaiety and
mirth, and
'the natural bent of his fancy,' to quote Burnet's words, 'made him so ex-
travagantly pleasant, that many to be more diverted by that humor, studied to
engage him deeper and deeper in intemperance, which at length did so
entirely subdue him, that, as he told me, for five years together he was
continually drunk
When Burnet wrote these words, he desired, no doubt, to make the
worst of Rochester. The greater the sin was, the greater the con-
version. And thus it was that Rochester's vices became legendary,
that Rochester himself was chosen as an awful example of de-
moniacal passion, a kind of bogey to frighten children withal.
Yet far worse than his manifold intemperance, in the eyes of
his contemporaries, were his principles of morality and religion.
Evelyn found him a very profane wit,' and, doubtless, he took a
peculiar pleasure in shocking that amiable philosopher. Worse
than all, he was 'a perfect Hobbist,' and, upon his Hobbism, bis
glaring vices seemed but evanescent spots. He freely owned to
Burnet, with a smile, let us hope, that
though he talked of morality as a fine thing, yet this was only because he
thought it a decent way of speaking, and that as they went always in clothes
though in their frolics
they would have chosen sometimes to have gone naked,
if they had not feared the people, so though some of them found it necessary
for human life to talk of morality, yet he confessed they cared not for it.
As in prose, so in verse, Rochester delighted to outrage his critics.
Dryden charged him with self-sufficiency, and out of his mouth he
might have convicted him. Thus writes Rochester in An Epistolary
Essay:
Born to myself, I like myself alone;
And must conclude my Judgment good, or none :
For cou'd my Sense be nought, how shou'd I know
Whether another Man's were good or no.
14
E. L. VIII.
CH. VIII.
## p. 210 (#232) ############################################
210
The Court Poets
If then I'm happy, what does it advance
Whether to Merit due, or Arrogance ?
Oh, but the World will take Offence thereby!
Why then the World shall suffer for't, not I.
But it was not the world which suffered. It was Rochester. Like
all men who set out to astonish the citizen, to put the worst
possible construction upon his own words and acts, he saw his
self-denunciation accepted for simple truth. Even Dr Johnson
did not rise superior to the prejudice of Rochester's own con-
temporaries. He, too, thought that Rochester's intervals of study
were 'yet more criminal' than his course of drunken gaiety
and gross sensuality,' and thus proved how long endures the effect
of mystification
As has been said, it is difficult in the clash of opinions to
disengage the character of Rochester. Fort impie, fort ordurier
dans ses propos et ses écritssuch is Hamilton's judgment.
6
There has not livd in many Ages (if ever) so extraordinary, and I think I
may add so useful a Person, as most Englishmen know my Lord to have
been, whether we consider the constant good Sense, and the agreeable
Mirth of his ordinary Conversation, or the vast Reach and Compass of his
Invention
-80 says Wolseley, his loyal panegyrist. Somewhere between
these two extremes the truth will be found. Rochester was as
little 'useful' as he was fort impie, fort ordurier. He was a man,
not a monster, a man of genius, moreover, and, in his hours, a man
of rare simplicity and candour. A good friend, a kind, if fickle,
lover, he has left behind in his letters a better proof of his
character than either obloquy or eulogy affords. His correspond-
ence with Henry Savile does equal credit to them both. Rochester's
letters are touched with the sadness which underlay his mirth, yet,
what spirit is in them, what courage, even when he confesses him-
self almost blind, utterly lame, and scarce within the reasonable
Hope of ever seeing London again'l As sickness overtakes him,
he leans the more heavily on Savile's friendship.
‘Harry,' he writes, ''tis not the least of my Happiness, that I think you
love me; but the first of my pretensions is to make it appear, that I faith-
fully endeavour to deserve it. If there be a real good upon earth, 'tis
in the name of Friend, without which all others are fantastical. How few
of us are fit stuff to make that thing, we have daily the melancholy ex.
perience. '
His letters to his wife, moreover, exhibit us a Rochester that has
hitherto been obscured from view. Whimsical, humorous, ironic, he
9
## p. 211 (#233) ############################################
A Quarrel with Mulgrave 2II
appears in them also, but something else than the cynical hunter
after pleasure. He shows himself curious concerning the details
of household management. He discusses oats and coal, deplores
the want of ready cash, which is hard to come by, and hopes his
wife excuses him sending no money, 'for till I am well enough,' thus
he writes, 'to fetch it myself, they will not give me a farthing, and
if I had not pawn'd my plate I believe I must have starv'd in my
sickness. ' Here, indeed, is an unfamiliar Rochester, in dire straits
of poverty, pawning his plate to keep his restless soul within its
case, and nearer to the truth, perhaps, than the monster painted
in their blackest colours by anxious divines.
Two episodes in Rochester's career have involved him in
charges of dishonour, from one of which he cannot emerge with
credit. In both, Mulgrave was engaged, and it is easy to believe
that the antipathy which separated the two men was innate and
profound. When neither of them was of age, Mulgrave, being
informed that Rochester had said something malicious of him,
sent colonel Aston to call him to account. Rochester proved,
even to Mulgrave's satisfaction, that he had not used the words,
but Mulgrave thought himself compelled by the mere rumour to
prosecute the quarrel. He owned his persistence foolish, and
Rochester, as it was his part to choose, elected to fight on horse-
back. They met at Knightsbridge, and Rochester brought with
him not his expected second, but ‘an errant life-guards-man, whom
nobody knew. Aston objected to the second as an unsuitable
adversary, especially considering how well he was mounted. ' And,
in the end, they agreed to fight on foot. Whereon, Rochester
declared that ‘he had at first chosen to fight on horseback, because
he was so weak with a certain distemper, that he found himself
unfit to fight at all any way, much less on foot. Accordingly, no
fight took place, and Mulgrave's second lost no time in spreading
a report injurious to Rochester, upon whom henceforth was fostered
a reputation for cowardice. The charge is not fully sustained.
Rochester, it seems, was too weak to fight a-foot, Mulgrave objected
to fight on horseback, being worse mounted. A little ingenuity
might have turned the blame on either side, and Mulgrave, by
his own confession, was persisting in a quarrel which had no
justification. But Rochester, with his customary cynicism, shrugged
his shoulders, and replied to the charge of cowardice with a famous
couplet:
Merely for safety, after Fame they thirst,
For all men would be Cowards if they durst.
14_2
## p. 212 (#234) ############################################
2 1 2
The Court Poets
The origin of his quarrel with Dryden is by no means creditable
to his honour or his generosity.
'He had a particular pique to him, says Saint-Évremond, after his mighty
success in the Town, either because he was sensible, that he deserved not that
applause for his Tragedies, which the mad, unthinking audience gave him,. . .
or out of indignation of having any rival in reputation. '
Whatever might be the cause of Rochester's malice, its effect was to
set up Crowne in opposition to Dryden, a piece of impudence which
nothing but Rochester's influence at court could have carried off.
And no sooner had Crowne enjoyed his unwarranted success than
Rochester withdrew his favour, 'as if he would still be in contra-
diction with the Town, and in that,' says Saint-Évremond with un-
contested truth, 'he was generally in the right, for of all Audiences
in polite Nations, perhaps there is not one which judges so very
falsely of the drama. With this piece of injustice Rochester was
not content. If he had been, An Essay on Satire soon gave him,
as he thought, another ground of anger. That he should have
attributed this piece of weak and violent spite to Dryden speaks
ill of his criticism. He might have discerned the hand of Mulgrave
in every line. Perhaps he believed them accomplices. At any rate,
as Dryden was going home one night from Will's to his lodging,
he was waylaid by a pack of ruffians and soundly beaten. There
is no doubt that Rochester was guilty of the outrage. His guilt
stands confessed in a letter to Savile. "You write me word,' says
he, 'that I am out of favour with a certain poet. . . . If he fall on
me at the Blunt, which is his very good Weapon in Wit, I will
forgive if you please, and leave the Repartee to Black Will, with a
Cudgel. ' The punishment he meted out to Mulgrave was better
deserved, and delivered in verse. As for Dryden, whose genius, as
whose age, should have protected him, he passed by Rochester
with a single reference. ‘An author of your own quality, whose
ashes I will not disturb,' he wrote to Buckhurst, with a magnanimity
which, even at this distance of time, it is hard to condone.
At the age of thirty-one, Rochester died, his wild oats sown,
and his mind turned to ampler purposes. Though his cynical
temper was still unconquered, his wit began 'to frame and fashion
itself to public business. As one of his friends tells us, he was
‘informing himself of the Wisdom of our Laws and the excellent
Constitution of the English Government, and spoke in the House
of Peers with general Approbation. ' That he would ever have
grown into a statesman is unlikely. The scandal of his life had
destroyed his authority. Besides, he was a poet, to whom politics
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Rochester's Writings
213
would ever have seemed a base trade. What he did for the solace of
his reputation was to make an edifying end, and to prove a chance
of exhortation to two divines. That these worthy men made him
out rather worse than he was is probable. Burnet, at any rate,
told us something of him by the way and set forth his views with
impartiality. So much may not be said of the Rev. Robert
Parsons, who merely handed him over, as an inverted hero, to the
authors of the chapbooks.
Such was the life and death of one who set forth his character
in his writings with the utmost candour. Though he was never
at the pains to gather together his flying sheets, though he is said
on his deathbed, one hopes falsely, to have desired the destruction
of his poems, it is his poems which still give us the true measure
of his genius. Yet, even here, misunderstanding has pursued him.
The worst that he wrote has been acclaimed to be the best.
Johnson declares that the strongest effort of his muse is his poem
entitled Nothing', a piece of ingenuity, unworthy his talent Still
more foolish has been the common assumption that Rochester's
poems are unfit to be read. In some few, he reached a height of
outspoken cynicism rarely scaled by an English poet. But the
most of his works may be studied without fear, and judged upon
their very high merits. Tonson's collection contains more than 200
pages, and amply justifies the claim, made for it by Rymer, that it
consists of such pieces only as may be received in a virtuous court,
and not unbecome the Cabinet of the severest Matron. '
It was in satire above all that Rochester excelled. For this
kind, he was richly endowed by nature and art. He had studied
the ancient models with constancy and understanding. The
quenchless vigour of his mind found its best expression in cas-
tigating the vices and foibles of humankind, which he knew so
well. His daring and malice equalled his vigour, and he attacked
Charles II, the Royal Angler, or Nelly, the reigning favourite, with as
light a heart as he brought to the demolition of Sir Car Scroop, the
purblind knight. He wrote the heroic couplet with a life and
freedom that few have excelled, and the most that can be said in his
dispraise is that, like the rest of the courtiers, he knew not the use
of the file. 'Rochester,' said Andrew Marvell, with the voice not
of flattery but of criticism, 'is the only man in England who has
1 Nothing as a theme was long a commonplace. Johnson compares with Rochester's
verses Passerat’s Latin poem Nihil (1567). Two years before Passerat, Sir Edward
Dyer had written a tract in prose, The Prayer of Nothing, which had suggested a popular
broadside, with the same title, printed in J. P. Collier's Book of Roxburghe Ballads (1847).
## p. 214 (#236) ############################################
214
The Court Poets
8
the true vein of Satire,' and Marvell, in speaking of satire, spoke
of an art which he himself had practised with success. And that
Rochester looked upon satire as an art is evident from the answer,
which he gave to Burnet, who objected that revenge and false-
hood were its blemishes.
'A man,' said he could not write with life, unless he were heated with
Revenge, for to make a Satire without Resentments, upon the cold Notions of
Philosophy, was as if a man would in cold blood cut men's throats, who had
never offended him. And he said, the lyes in these Libels came often in as
ornaments that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the Poem. '
| His masterpiece, without doubt, is A Satire against Mankind.
Imitated from Boileau, it bears in every line the impress of
Rochester's mind. The energy of its thought and style separates
it sharply from its original, and, if you compare the two works, you
may find a clue to the difference between French and English.
The one is marked by order, moderation, and good sense. The
other moves impetuous like a torrent, and sweeps out of its way
the prejudices of all time.
