The ways of Charles II's court and
government
gave
them only too much opportunity for scurrilous obscenity.
them only too much opportunity for scurrilous obscenity.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
1
The bear having been badly mauled in the battle, the retreat
is saved by the cobbler Cerdon and by Trulla, who leads
The Warrior to a grassy Bed,
As Authors write, in a cool Shade,
Which Eglantine and Roses made,
Close by a softly murm'ring Stream,
Where lovers us'd to loll and dream.
1 There is even an instance of aposiopesis :
Which now thou shalt-bat first our care
Must see how Hudibras doth fare,
imitating the Vergilian Quos ego-sed motos, etc.
## p. 70 (#92) ##############################################
70
Samuel Butler
This is a ludicrous imitation of the first book of the Aeneid, where
Venus puts Ascanius to rest in similar surroundings.
Hudibras had been victorious in the first battle and, with the
help of the squire, had put Crowdero in the stocks; but, in a second
encounter, after the combatants have rallied their forces, he is
worsted, and, with Ralpho, takes the place of Crowdero. Even
here, while Hudibras
Cheer'd up himself with ends of Verse
And Sayings of Philosophers,
Ralpho the independent resumes his attack on the presbyterians,
and we are treated to the catch-words 'gifts,' “illumination,' 'light,'
synodical,'' orders,''constitutions,' church-censures' and so forth.
Challenged by the knight, he repeats his argument that synods are
mystical bear-gardens, in which saints are represented by the bear
and presbyters and scribes by the dogs that are set upon them.
‘Synods are whelps of the inquisition, and they have their
‘triers' (or testers), whose business it is
To cast a figure for men's Light;
To find in lines of Beard and Face
The Physiognomy of Grace,
And by the sound and twang of Nose
If all be sound within disclose.
The second part, which was published a year after the first,
proceeds uninterruptedly with the story, taking up the case of the
widow whom, in the third canto of the first part, Hudibras had after
his victory wished to gain, meeting, however, with discomfiture. The
widow, informed of this by Fame (parodied from the fourth book of
the Aeneid), determines to visit him in the stocks, and there entices
him to declare himself. Thus, we have another argument between
them, in which the knight's shameless self-seeking is exposed and
the superiority of the female sex is maintained. In proof of his
good faith, Hudibras has to promise to submit to flagellation. The
notion of whipping and the mode of carrying it out is borrowed
from Don Quixote, where Sancho Panza is called upon to endure
three thousand lashes in order to obtain the disenchantment of
Dulcinea del Toboso. Hudibras solemnly swears that he will
carry out this behest.
The next (the second) canto is introduced by the poet as
especially full of contention, and it is here that the hypocritical
casuistry of the two sects who were principally concerned in the
civil war is most clearly exposed. Hudibras, after a night's
1 Bk. II, chap. 85.
## p. 71 (#93) ##############################################
Saints in Public and in Private 71
Life Life
reflection, does not relish the idea of a flogging and turns to the
squire for his judgment on the subject. Ralpho readily proceeds
to 'enlarge upon the point. ' First, it is heathenish to offer the
sacrifice of whipping to idols, and it is sinful to do so in saints who
are sufficiently bruised and kicked by the wicked. Moreover,
The Saints may claim a Dispensation
To swear and forswear on occasion. . . .
and,
Although your Church be opposite
To ours as Black Friers are to White
In Rule and Order; yet I grant
You are a Reformado Saint.
He then, with pungent raillery, particularises breaches of faith
on the part of the ‘saints. ' They broke the allegiance and
supremacy oath, and compelled the nation to take and break the
protestation in favour of the reformed religion, to swear and
forswear the solemn league and covenant, to enter into and then
disclaim the engagement to be true to the government without king
or peers. They swore to fight for and against the king, insisting
that it was in his defence, and also for and against their own
general Esses. They swore to maintain law, religion and privilege
in parliament, not one of which is left; having sworn to maintain
the House of Lords, they turned them out as dangerous and
useless.
If this be so in public life, a saint in private life can be no more
bound by an oath.
A Saint 's of th' heavenly Realm a Peer:
And as no Peer is bound to swear,
But on the Gospel of his Honor,
Of which he may dispose as Owner;
It follows, though the thing be forgery
And false th' affirm, it is no perjury.
This suggests a gibe at the despised quakers, who, nevertheless,
are scrupulous in this matter :
These, thinking th’are obliged to Troth,
In swearing will not take an Oath.
Hudibras agrees and insists that, like a law, an oath is of no
use till it is broken. Ralpho, continuing, points out that a man
may be whipped by proxy, and
That Sinners may supply the place
Of suffering Saints is a plain Case.
Hudibras jumps at this, and at once bids Ralpho be his substitute.
## p. 72 (#94) ##############################################
72
Samuel Butler
He refuses, and, when Hudibras becomes abusive, reminds him of
the superiority of the independent party.
Remember how in Arms and Politicks
We still have worsted all your holy Tricks;
Trapann'd your party with Intregue
And took your Grandees down a peg;
New-modelld th’ Army and Cashierd
All that to Legion Smec adher'd.
(Legion Smec is intended for the presbyterians generally, under
the well known composite name ‘Smectymnuus. ') Hudibras retorts
furiously, upbraiding his squire as an upstart sectary and a
mongrel,
Such as breed out of peccant Humors
Of our own Church, like Wens and Tumours,
And, like a Maggot in a Sore,
Would that which gave it Life devour.
This, of course, refers to the numberless sects that sprang up at
this time, holding often the strangest of views.
The champions are proceeding to blows when they are inter-
rupted by a frightful noise caused by a woman being escorted in
triumph by a rabble, for having beaten her husband. Hudibras
must needs interfere, being particularly scandalised by the dis-
honour done to the sex that furnished the saints' with their first
'apostles. ' He enlarges on the help women have given to the
cause,' in language that might be a parody of Hooker, but the
rabble sets upon them with eggs and similar projectiles, so they are
glad to escape with the loss of their swords. Hudibras consoles
himself, seeing a good omen in his having been pelted with dirt:
Vespasian being dawb'd with durt
Was destin'd to the Empire for 't.
The third canto introduces a new element. By Ralpho's advice,
Hudibras entertains the notion of consulting an astrologer, Sidro-
phel, as to his prospects in the pursuit of the widow. The question
as to the permissibility of consulting a person who is scripturally
banned is decided in his favour— saints may employ a conjurer. '
The description of Sidrophel and his zany Whachum, 'an under-
witch, his Caliban,' is but little inferior to the account of Hudibras
and the squire at the beginning of the poem. Much of it is derived
from Rabelais, who has collected a great number of methods
of divination. Butler, however, makes considerable additions
from his own store, derived from the superstitions of common
6
1
1 Pref. c. III, § 13.
? Bk. III, chap. 25.
## p. 73 (#95) ##############################################
Hudibras, Part III
73
life. At first, Hudibras is impressed by the extraordinary know-
ledge displayed by the astrologer; but, afterwards, in matching his
own store of learning with it, finds himself disabused, especially
when Sidrophel quotes as a recent event a fictitious adventure of
his own, which had appeared in a spurious continuation of the first
part of Hudibras. This leads to the usual scuffle, in which the
astrologer and Whachum are worsted, and Ralpho is despatched
for a. constable; while Hudibras, under the false impression that
Sidrophel is dead, makes off, intending the squire to bear the
charge of murder and robbery, though he himself has rummaged
the astrologer's pockets.
This is the conclusion of the first and second parts of the poem,
published respectively in 1663 and 1664. The third part, which
takes up the story, was not published till 1678, and shows con-
siderable difference in the treatment of the subject.
Unlike the earlier parts, it contains very few classical allusions,
and these are of the most obvious kind, such as the Trojan horse
and Cerberus; the style, too, is smoother and requires less ex-
planation. This may be the result of experience and of hints
received by the writer in the intervening years. But the thread
of the story is taken up without interruption. The knight, having
determined to abjure Ralpho, makes his way to the widow's house;
but, unfortunately for him, the squire had formed the same resolu-
tion and forestalled him. When Hudibras appears, the lady is
.
found fully informed on all points, and is able to oppose a true
account to all his false claims of suffering on her behalf. The
controversy for and against marriage again betrays the knight's
unscrupulous selfishness, and a finishing stroke has set forth his
contemptible character, when a low knocking is heard at the gate,
and, flying in terror into a neighbouring room, he hides under a
table. He is ignominiously drawn out and cudgelled by (as he
supposes) Sidrophel's diabolical agents. Under the influence of
superstitious terrors, he confesses the motives that impelled him in
his suit, and answers to a catechism which divulges all his iniquities;
and, that nothing may be wanting to complete his humiliation, he
mistakes his squire Ralpho, who has been similarly beaten and left
in the same dark room, for a more or less friendly spirit; where-
upon, the pair make confession of the enormities perpetrated by
the rival sects in the civil wars.
The final act of the burlesque follows in the third canto of this
part, the second being a satirical account of the death of Cromwell
and of the intrigues of the various parties before the restoration.
## p. 74 (#96) ##############################################
74
Samuel Butler
2
>
The knight, having been withdrawn from his place of torture on
Ralpho's shoulders, is induced by the squire to consult a lawyer.
At first, he cries down this scheme, in order to adopt it afterwards
as his own. He adopts it ungraciously 'since he has no better
course' and consoles himself with the, often misquoted, couplet
He that complies against his Will
Is of his own Opinion still.
Butler now has an opportunity of exhibiting a lawyer in what
he probably considered a true light. The advice this person gives
exemplifies the use that was made in the older jurisprudence of
cautelae, or methods of getting round legal enactments, and
Hudibras is instructed to ply the widow with love-letters and
With Trains t inveigle and surprise
Her heedless Answers and Replies.
This counsel is followed, and we have the knight's letter and the
lady's answer, in which the latter, undoubtedly, has the best of the
argument.
The second canto of the third part stands quite by itself and
has nothing to do with the fortunes of Hudibras. It is merely
an account, more or less detailed, of the principles and politics
of the presbyterians, independents and republicans during the
anarchy before the restoration. Rebellion had slackened for want
of plunder, and presbyterian and independent were now at logger-
heads. The presbyterians were turned out, and were glad to become
itinerant preachers; they were served as they had treated the
cavaliers, and decried the anabaptists and fanatics as much as they
had done the papists and the prelatists before. Now, the inde-
pendents were prepared to pull down everything that the war had
spared and to intrigue among themselves. Meantime, the royalists,
true to church and crown, notwithstanding their sufferings, came
together again on seeing their foes divided ;
For Loyalty is still the same,
Whether it win or lose the Game;
True as a Dial to the Sun,
Although it be not shin'd upon.
'Cromwell had given up his reign, Tossed in a furious hurricane';
his feeble son had sunk under the burden of state, and now the
'saints' began their rule, but could not agree among themselves.
Some were for a king, others wished to set up the fifth mon-
archy; some were for the Rump parliament, others for a general
council of officers; some were for gospel government, others for
pulling down presbyterian synods and classes ; some, for opposing
>
## p. 75 (#97) ##############################################
The Method of Hudibras 75
the papacy, putting down saints' days and demolishing churches ;
some, for having regular ministers, others, for soldier preachers.
Some would abolish surplices and the use of the ring in the
marriage service, while re-establishing the Judaic law, and putting
an end to the use of the cross in baptism and to giving the names
of saints to churches or streets. Others disallowed the idea of
limbus patrum, where the souls of holy men rest till the judgment.
Meantime, the "quacks of government,' such as Sir Anthony
Ashley Cooper and John Lilburne, who saw the necessity of a
restoration, were discussing matters in secret conclave. Butler
gives a wonderful description of Cooper (which should be compared
with Dryden's Achitophel) and of John Lilburne, who both make
long speeches on present events and the way they should be met,
but ultimately go off into violent recriminations as representatives
of the presbyterians and the independents ; till they are suddenly
interrupted by a messenger who brings the news of the burning of
the members of the Rump in effigy. This gives an opportunity for
some rough banter on the explanation of the word rump (especially
on its Hebrew equivalent luz), which is to be found in Butler's
character entitled 'An Hermetic Philosopher'l. But, soon, the
mob appear with the purpose of hauling out the members of this
assembly and burning them. They beat an ignominious retreat,
and this ends the second canto, which has been treated last,
because it is disconnected with the main story of Hudibras.
♡ It may be well here, in retrospect, to examine Butler's methods
in the composition of his poem. The date of publication, three
years after the restoration, is sufficient to suggest that it must
have found an appreciative audience, at a time when the events to
which it referred were fresh in men's minds, and when, as we know,
a violent reaction against puritanism had set in. The learning
and scientific knowledge displayed, the turns of wit, racy metaphors
and quaint rimes have secured its continuance as an English
classic ; but, much of the legal knowledge having become obsolete,
or being too technical for ordinary readers, and many of the
minor historical allusions being forgotten, a continuous perusal
of the book requires unusual perseverance. Moreover, the length
of some of the descriptions of persons or events is trying to the
patience, although the illustrations or parallels in themselves are
pertinent and acute. The sparkling wit and humour displayed
enlightens and relieves the discussions which make up much of the
book. Humorous as are the arguments, the witty and whimsical
• Characters, etc. , ed. Waller, A. R. , p. 105.
## p. 76 (#98) ##############################################
76
Samuel Butler
comparisons serve as flashlights to bring into relief what might
otherwise become dull by reason of its length.
Thus, the peculiarities of religious tenets are illustrated by the
presbyterians, who
Compound for sins they are inclin'd to
By damning those they have no mind to,
and, in their cantankerousness, are
Still so perverse and opposite,
As if they worshipp'd God for spite;
and by the independents and anabaptists, who are dubbed 'land
and water saints'; the latter are said
To dive like wild-fowl for Salvation
And fish to catch Regeneration.
Ralpho, who has a touch of the anabaptist, when rising from his
bed, is said to 'adventure Resurrection. ' A classical comparison is
found in Achilles, who was
anabaptiz'd free of wound
All over, but the pagan heel.
The sects are ever squabbling for change of doctrine,
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
The philosophical virtuoso, Sir Kenelm Digby, is gibed at in
the description of the pouch worn by Orsin, the pugnacious
bear-ward,
Replete with strange hermetick Powder
That Wounds nine miles point-blank would solder;
and Hudibras is represented as spurring his courser,
Conveying sympathetic Speed
From Heel of Knight to Heel of Steed.
Homeric and classical similes and allusions are frequent in
the first two parts. We have the intervention of 'Pallas, who
came in shape of Rust,' to prevent a pistol going off, and ‘Mars,
who still protects the stout'; a stone that strikes Ralpho is com-
pared to that hurled by Diomed. Hudibras, in assisting Ralpho to
his feet, boasts that
Caesar himself could never say
He got two victries in a day
As I have done, that can say, twice I
In one day veni, vidi, vici.
Perhaps the comparisons from common life are more amusing;
for instance, the celebrated simile :
And like a Lobster boil'd, the Morn
From black to red began to turn;
## p. 77 (#99) ##############################################
Metre of Hudibras
77
though this is not quite equal to its original in Rabelais, who says
that lobsters are cardinalised by boiling. Very comic is the
comparison of a sword that had fallen from its owner's grip to
deserting rats.
He snatched his Whiniard up, that fled
When he was falling from his Steed,
As Rats do from a falling House.
This is Pliny's ruinis imminentibus musculi praemigrant. The
whole poem is a storehouse of such borrowings.
Dryden, in the dedication of his translation of Juvenal and
Persius (1692), while expressing admiration of Butler for being able
to put 'thought' into his verses, strongly disapproves of his choice
of octosyllabic metre.
Besides, the double Rhyme (a necessary companion of Burlesque writing)
is not so proper for manly Satir, for it turns Earnest too much into Jest, and
gives us a boyish kind of Pleasure. It tickles awkwardly with a kind of
Pain to the best sort of Readers; and we are pleased ungratefully, and if
I may say so, against our liking.
But Butler knew that ridicule was his strongest weapon, and that it
would please Charles II and his courtiers better than stately
rhythm or fiery denunciation. Rimed decasyllabic suited Dryden's
form of satire, as we see in his Absalom and Achitophel, and
was well adapted to Pope's polished antitheses; but, for gibes
and quick sallies of wit, octosyllabic metre, in competent hands,
is the most fitting instrument.
As Butler died in 1680, it is impossible to say whether he con-
templated a further instalment of his poem, so as to bring up the
tale of his cantos to twelve, after the example of the Aeneid; the
sixth canto, that is, the third of the second book, finishes, evidently,
with a view to a continuation which is provided by the third part.
But there is an incompleteness apparent in this part, suggested
first by the interpolation of the second canto, which has nothing to
do with the action of the poem, and which might fittingly have
been introduced in a subsequent continuation, while the letter
of Hudibras and the Lady's answer ought to have been incorporated
in the main story rather than be left isolated. The third part
is longer than the first by 590 lines and, if the two letters are
added, by nearly 1340. It seems not an unfair inference that, had
the satirist's life and strength. permitted, an additional part of
three cantos would have been added, to complete the normal
number of twelve, and that the third part would not have run to
so disproportionate a length.
## p. 78 (#100) #############################################
78
Samuel Butler
It remains to offer a few considerations on the main purpose of
a
Butler's satire-a frontal attack on puritanism. He probably was
unaware that a change was in progress from a personal to a
constitutional monarchy, disguised by a religious upheaval which
might be regarded as the groundswell after the storm of the
reformation. He was a fervent royalist, but kept mainly to the
religious side of the question.
The publication of the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611
had set men thinking of the treasure that had fallen into their
hands, and very many now read persistently the one book upon
which they looked as the guide to salvation. This dwelling on one
authority upset the balance of mind of many whose reading was
thus limited; and men learned to identify themselves with the
conquering, exterminating children of Israel, and to look upon
all who opposed them in politics or church doctrine as men of
Belial, Moabites, Amalekites and other adversaries of Israel and
of God, and as their own personal enemies, to be overthrown at
any cost and by any means of force or fraud. But, as Dante says
finely of another sect,
Their meditations reach not Nazareth.
Examples may readily be found of similar perversions of Scripture;
but an instance which stands out, by reason of the beauty of its
language and the terrible nature of its denunciation, occurs in
Milton's tract, Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in
England, where the reward assured to his own partisans and
the punishment to be meted out to his adversaries are enunciated
in startling contrast? .
The mental exaltation arrived at by such homines unius libri
was extraordinary, and rendered them capable of efforts in their
enthusiasm which upset all calculation. So long as they were
sincere in their beliefs, their conduct may have been commendable;
but it is the fate of human nature, when men have attained
success by these means, to become dazzled by the height of the
pinnacle they have reached, and, when enthusiasm flags, to become
subject to deplorable lapses. And, when the spoils of the van-
quished lie at the mercy of the victors, cupidity and the baser
feelings of human nature often gain the mastery over former high
resolves. This was frequently the case in the period of the civil
war and the commonwealth.
As an unswerving royalist, a native of a county that was
1. Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints,' eto.
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
Butler's Gifts and Powers 79
conspicuous for its loyalty, Butler could admit the divine right
of kings and allow that the king could do no wrong; but he could
not allow that the opposing party could do right, especially after
the confiscations and oppressions of which they had been guilty
towards the royalists and the episcopalian clergy. Moreover, the
Long parliament, which had included many bigh-minded patriots,
had degenerated and dwindled into the miserable, place-loving
Rump, a fit object of scorn and contempt.
Some precursors of the form and style of Hudibras have been
mentioned; but the strange rimes which it contains, and which have
helped considerably to keep it in remembrance, must not be passed
by. The curious jingles of 'ecclesiastic' and 'a stick,' 'duty' and
‘shoe-tie,' discourse' and 'whiskers,' and many more, have recalled
the poem in name at least) to many readers to whom much of the
historical detail has become obsolete. In this exercise, Butler had
a late rival in Calverley, whose metrical skill and delicately
sensitive ear would, however, not permit him to employ any
uncouth rime that his nimble fancy might suggest-every line
must ring true; whereas, in Butler's jog-trot lines, a monstrous
rime has the effect of relieving the monotony of the verse without
being out of harmony with it.
Samuel Butler, in fine, may be looked upon as a rare but erratic
genius with an extraordinary gift of satirical expression, and as a
man of great learning, who might have produced a serious poem of
merit, had the bent of his mind lain in that direction. Dryden
expressed a belief that Butler would have excelled in any other
kind of metre; and his powers in serious verse are sufficiently
attested by the following extract from Hudibras:
The Moon pulld off her veil of Light,
That hides her face by day from sight,
(Mysterious Veil, of brightness made,
That's both her lustre, and her shade)
And in the Night as freely shon,
As if her Rays had been her own:
For Darkness is the proper Sphere,
Where all false Glories use t'appear.
The twinkling Stars began to muster,
And glitter with their borrow'd luster,
While 'Sleep the weary'd World relier'd,
By counterfeiting Death reviv'di.
II, 1, 905–915. The same metaphor is employed by Milton in a magnificent
passage addressed to the Deity as the author and source of light, a subject which
always appealed strongly to the blind poet:
Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear
And dazzle heaven.
(Paradise Lost, III, 380. )
1
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
CHAPTER III
POLITICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL SATIRE
In the period following on the restoration of Charles II, satirical
poetry on political subjects took permanent root in England. It is
true that there had already been satires, like those of Cleiveland
and the cavalier ballad-writers, written on behalf of one faction
in the state against its rival, as well as lampoons upon some foreign
enemy; but these had been sporadic, and have the appearance
of being not so much concerted attacks as outbursts of irritation
or grumblings of the governed about their rulers. Now, however,
came the beginnings of an organised, continuous depreciation of
each party by the other side, with a definite end in view, that
is, to exclude rival politicians from power by discrediting them
in public opinion. After the king's return, there became per-
ceptible certain features of English life, political, social and literary,
which specially favoured a new development of satiric literature.
In politics, we have the slow integration of two parties within the
constitution. Cavalier and puritan had held mutually irreconcil-
able views on fundamental questions, and were prepared to proceed
to extremities to uphold them. It was otherwise with their
successors, who were slow in becoming completely antagonistic,
and were then so nearly balanced in resources and so afraid of civil
war as to form the habit of toleration in fact, if not in theory.
When consistent anglicans and ci-devant presbyterians divided
between them the Long parliament of Charles II, their differences
arose chiefly on matters of practical policy on which the vanquished
could afford to await better times. Concerning the position of
monarch and church, there was no real dispute. But there were
divergences as to what measures of immediate import should be
taken by the monarch and as to what extent of conformity was
expedient in the church; and the actions of the restoration
government were sufficiently coherent to permit of its supporters
and opponents coalescing among themselves, and, in the sequel,
forming the court and the country parties. A process which, at
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
Denham.
81
Marvell
first, was very gradual, furnished forth the two combatants in
a perennial duel.
At the same time, new social conditions came into being with
the increased preponderance of London in the national life, and
with the new and strictly urban habits which Londoners were
forming. Town and country were becoming more differentiated
than they had ever been before: and the townsmen, among whom
we may include many members of the aristocracy who spent part
of the year in London, composed an apt audience for the new kind
of literary political warfare. Coffee-house and park gave an
atmosphere where satire could flourish, while the increased facility
of communication both altered the tastes of the country gentry
by bringing them to town and maintained their allegiance to the
supremacy of London by allowing the steady transmission of news-
letters and pamphlets from the capital to the provinces.
Lastly, the revolution in literary ideals was peculiarly suitable
for satire. Here, at least, in invective on men and things, there
was ample scope for a reasoned perspicuous line, dealing with life
as it was known, and for the strongly knit couplet, which simulated
wit, even when not possessing it, and which was eminently well
adapted for sharp, hard practicalities.
It was in the years 1666-7, when the unpopularity of Clarendon
was at its height, and when the disasters of the Dutch war brought
into strong relief the faults and failures of the men in power, that
Sir John Denham began the series of Caroline political satires.
However little merit his four Instructions to a Painter, dour
travesties of Waller's adulation which bore the same name, might
possess, they started a fresh genre. Recent events, fact or fable,
were narrated in the heroic couplet with malign distortion or biting
veracity. It 'made my heart ake to read,' says Pepys of the fourth
satire in the series, “it being too sharp, and so true. ' Andrew
Marvell, who had begun as a lyric poet, followed in Denham's
wake with his Last Instructions to a Painter in 1667, the most
powerful of these satires, and, from that date until his death in
1678, remained the ablest satirist opposed to the court'. Farther
Instructions to a Painter, An Historical Poem, Advice to a
Painter, and the dialogue Britannia and Raleigh were all from
his pen; and, before he died, imitators, such as the author of the
grimly-humorous Dream of the Cabal, were springing up.
The common characteristic of these compositions was their
journalistic nature. They were riming pamphlets professing to
1 For a general account of Marvell’s literary work see ante, vol. VII, pp. 180 ff.
6
E. L. VIII.
CH. III.
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
give actual events and court secrets, in the form either of rambling
narratives or of descriptions of persons taken seriatim. For them,
art is a subordinate factor, and their rough couplets show very
little of it.
The ways of Charles II's court and government gave
them only too much opportunity for scurrilous obscenity. Vigour,
wit and humour in a high degree are to be found in them. Marvell
had a real knowledge of affairs and statesmanlike insight. Not
personal resentment, but a strong conviction of the evils of the day
urged him on to his vituperative satire, and he stabs home with a
scientific precision. In satires of this class, however, moral in-
dignation, although it is not absent, frequently makes but a poor
show, owing to the abundance of the very filth which is brought
forward as justification for it. Of their contemporary influence,
we can hardly doubt. So they reached their aim, which was
political and not at all poetic.
A new turn was given to Charles II's reign and to English
history by the panic of the Popish plot in 1678—9. The clumsy
inventions spun from the prolific imagination of Oates succeeded
in giving the final impulse to the completion of the inchoate
parties. A definite political creed, anti-Romanism, and a definite
political aim, the exclusion of the duke of York, were furnished to
the country party, while passive obedience and the supremacy
of the anglican church were the tenets of their opponents ; and
from this contest emerge the historic whig and tory. Under these
conditions of popular passion and national division, political satire
could come fully into its own.
The first poet who entered the lists was John Oldham, and his
special genius, the circumstances of his life and the tendencies
of the day, all conspired to make him a true pioneer. In place of
the journalistic writings of Marvell and his like, half platform-
oratory, half 'leading-articles, he produced a satire, the merit and
scope of which were of a purely literary kind. He wrote satire for
satire's sake:
Satyr's my only province and delight
For whose dear sake alone I've vow'd to write:
For this I seek occasions, court abuse,
To show my parts and signalize my musel,
This was an innovation, but one which it was easier for Oldham to
introduce than for his contemporaries. The son of a nonconformist
minister, John Oldham, he was born at Shipton-Moyne, near
Tetbury in Gloucestershire, on 9 August 1653. His father sub-
· Upon a Printer.
a
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
Oldham
83
sequently removed to Newton in Wiltshire, from which he was
ejected in 1662; thenceforward, he remained as a dissenting minister
at Wotton-under-edge in the Cotswolds, outliving his poetic son for
many years. The latter received his education at Tetbury grammar
school, and was next sent to Oxford, to St Edmund's hall, in 1670.
He obtained his bachelor's degree in May 1674, and then left the
university to reside for about a year with his father. Neither his
religious opinions at this time, we may presume, nor the inde-
pendence of character which often flashes out in his verse, would
incline him to take orders, with a view to a chaplaincy in some
noble household and a country living as a sequel. He was evidently
without means. So we find him undertaking the post of usher in
Whitgift's school at Croydon until 1678, and following this by the
more tolerable occupation of a private tutor, first to the grandsons
of a judge, Sir Edward Thurland, and, in 1681, to the son of
Sir William Hickes. This last employment brought him to the
neighbourhood of London and made him acquainted with the
literary men of the day, to whom his poems were already known.
Rochester and one or two others had, indeed, apparently visited
the young pedagogue at Croydon on the strength of his compositions
then circulating in manuscript, but nothing had come of the
interview. Now, however, the new earl of Kingston rescued
Oldham from his scholastic thraldom, became his patron and, on
occasion, his host, and offered him, we are told, the unwelcome
position of his chaplain. Be this as it may, we can well imagine
that the pert, satiric face which looks out of Oldham's portrait
belonged to an amusing companion. The profession of a man of
letters, nevertheless, in the life of the seventeenth century, could
not easily be carried on except under conditions of dependence if
not of servility, and Oldham's eagerness to escape from compliance
to them is shown by his resolve to take up medicine for a livelihood,
and by the year's study which he devoted to it. But his health
was breaking down; he is said to have been consumptive; on
9 December 1683, he fell a victim to the smallpox at Kingston's
seat, Holme-Pierrepoint near Nottingham.
This schoolmaster's life must have inclined a naturally haughty,
sardonic temperament in the direction of satire. He may, also,
have accustomed himself to make the most of a natural proneness
to indignation, in order the more to impress his pupils. And the
aloofness of his life from the capital, combined with the classical
studies necessary for his occupation, was a fit environment for the
first author of generalising satires, where incidental railing gives
642
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
place to artistic composition without too constant a reference to
immediate facts.
He does not seem, however, to have discovered his métier at
once, for his earliest dated poem, The Dream, written in March
1677, was amatory, in a luscious, adolescent strain. This was
composed in the heroic couplet, but he was already under the
spell of Cowley and, with his usual vis animi, was putting all
his energy into Cowleyan Pindaric odes. He was not without
qualifications for the task, being both fecund in ideas and forcible
in their expression. He also brought out the defects of the metre:
his stanzas do not run easily; the difficulty of preserving a measure
of grace in a poetical form which aspired to continual hyperbole
becomes painfully obvious ; and, comparing him with Cowley, we
may say that his trumpet has a brassier sound. His vice of tur-
gidity and his often successful, but invariable, method of heaping
effect on effect to reach one great towering climax, were bred
under Cowley's influence. Among these exercises in a tuneless
metre, some three or four stand out. The early Dithyrambic,
a Drunkard's speech in a Masque, can claim dramatic fitness for
its monotonous extravagance and has a fine rhetorical close with
its reference to
the Tomb,
Nature's convenient dark Retiring-Room.
The ode Upon the Works of Ben Jonson contains just
criticism, if it falls far short of the sublime, which is needlessly
attempted. The Satyr against Vertue, however, provides a link
with its author's more enduring work. Here, the Pindarique
hyperbole is first used for a tirade against virtue and then to
express a grandiose, if rather external, conception of vice.
'Tis I the bold Columbus, only I,
Who must new Worlds in vice descry,
And fix the pillars of unpassable iniquity.
This heavyhanded irony was taken for earnest by some of its
readers, and Oldham thought it best to write later a similar high-
flown recantation. But the finest of his works in this style is the
ode To the Memory of Mr Charles Morwent, an intimate friend
whose death, in 1675, probably long preceded the finished poem.
In this panegyric, there is less bombast than appears in the others,
and its great length makes a single movement to a climax im-
possible. There are happy phrases, like the pale Cheeks do
penance in their white,' and the numerous images employed
become the subject well. On the other hand, Morwent's virtues
.
! !
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
Satyrs upon the Jesuits
85
are so universal and unlimited as to lack verisimilitude ; but this
is a fault of the Pindaric style, and not personal to Oldham.
It was in 1678 that Oldham realised his powers-by accident,
may be-in A Satyr upon a Woman, who by her Falshood and
Scorn was the Death of my Friend. Here, he makes use of the
heroic couplet, which was his really effective medium, to express
the uttermost of hatred. His voice seems to rise to a hoarse
scream. Railing and cursing achieve a kind of attractiveness by
reaching the acme of their power, although, perhaps, a few words
would have spoken more of the heart. In amplitude and mag-
nificence, however, A Satyr upon a Woman was outdone in the
next year by his chief work, the four Satyrs upon the Jesuits.
The first of them was printed without Oldham's consent, in 1679 ;
and he published the whole series, with a few other poems, in
1681. They were without a dedication, a strong evidence of their
author's natural haughtiness in that age of fulsome flattery.
There does not seem to be any reason to doubt Oldham's
sincerity in his masterpiece. His nonconformist upbringing and
popular surroundings make it quite natural that he should have
shared in the frenzied panic of the Popish plot; while his usual
extravagance of expression and of resentment, if they make us
discount his meaning, also guarantee the reality of his sentiments.
But there is also a definite artistic bias running through the poems.
Oldham enjoyed satire by his own confession, and he was a school-
master learned in the classics. The Prologue is after Persius ; the
first satire, Garnet's Ghost, owes its inception to the prologue by
Sylla's ghost in Ben Jonson's Catiline; the third, Loyola's Will,
derives its design’from Buchanan's Franciscanus; the idea of the
fourth, St Ignatius his Image, is drawn from Horace. All these
varied debts, however, which Oldham himself owns, are thrown
into the shade by the dominating influence of Juvenal. We do
not merely find imitation of isolated passages, or even of rhetorical
artifices, like the abrupt opening of most of the satires or the
frequent employment of the climax. What is of the highest
importance is the generalising style and the habit of declamatory
highstrained invective—the love of massed and unrelieved gloom
for the sake of artistic effect. The lists of current misdeeds, the con-
temporary criticism or misrepresentation common in the satirist's
English predecessors, give place to fanciful general scenes, where
he tries to represent an imaginary ecstasy of wickedness.
The four satires have little intricacy of design. In the first, the
ghost of Garnet, the Jesuit instigator of the Gunpowder plot,
addresses a kind of diabolic homily to the Jesuits in conclave after
a
*
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
6
Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey's murder. The second merely inveighs
against the Society in the author's own person. In the third, the
dying Loyola gives his disciples a rule of concentrated villainy.
In the fourth, his image relates the frauds supposed to be worked
in Roman Catholic worship. When we come to examine the poetic
qualities of these satires in detail, we are at once struck by the
harshness of the verse. This shows itself not so much in the
monotonous energy of the rhythm, although it would seem that it
was this which moved contemporary criticism most, as in the
extreme uncouthness of the rimes. Oldham could rime enroll'd,'
‘rul'd' and 'spoil'd,' together; and this is not an exception, but an
instance of his regular practice. In fact, he was unaware of the
cacophony, and, when his verse was criticised, took occasion to
show that he could write smoothly by the translation of two Greek
pastorals, Bion and The Lamentation for Adonis. But, in these
pieces, his bad rimes recur with little less frequency, and the lack
of
range in his melody is brought out the more by the comparison
of the refrain in Bion, apparently due to Rochester?
Come, all ye Muses, come, adorn the Shepherd's hearse
With never-fading garlands, never-dying verse-
with Oldham's own refrain in Adonis :
I mourn Adonis, the sad Loves bemoan,
The comely fair Adonis dead and gone.
To proceed from questions of technique to matter, a serious defect
of these satires is their continual exaggeration. The hyperbole of
Pindarics is transferred to them, and, their purpose being com-
minatory, the result is an atmosphere of overcharged gloom. He
accumulates horror on horror with a sole view to melodrama. The
sense of irony or ordinary humour and any faculty for dexterous
mockery seem banished from his writings. Even the satire on his
peccant printer is in the grandiose style, and his stage cannon are
fired off for the event. By consequence, dramatic fitness is entirely
absent from his original satires. He places his objurgations in
Jesuit mouths, making an extraordinary mixture of triumphant,
conscious wickedness and bigotry. The dying Loyola laments that
‘mighty Julian mist his aims,' and that thus the Bible remained
undestroyed, and declares Iscariot 'Th' example of our great
Society. Garnet's ghost gloats over the Gunpowder plot as a
rival to 'Hell's most proud exploit,' and exhorts his successors to
have only will
Like Fiends and me to covet and act ill.
Yet these professed villains are somehow occupied in fighting
1 See Oldham's advertisement to Poems and Translations, edition of 1686.
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
Oldham as a Satirist
87
'heretics' and in saving the church. The muddle is inextricable,
and the sentiments are worthy of Hieronimo.
To Oldham's lack of dramatic instinct must be attributed his
want of variety. His only ways of creating an effect were to lead
up to a climax, to pile up the agony. In their use, indeed, he was
a master. Incredible blood and thunder fill the scene; but they, at
least, make a real clamour and smell raw. There is an expansive
energy and exaltation in such a passage as that on Charles IX and
Bartholomew's day :
He soorn'd like common murderers to deal
By parcels and piecemeal; he scorn'd retail
I th' trade of Death: whole myriads dy'd by th' great,
Soon as one single life; so quick their fate,
Their very pray’rs and wishes came too late.
These lines testify to Oldham's power of finding repeatedly
a vivid, impressive phrase, not merely by a verbal ingenuity, but
largely through a keen realisation of the ideas which entered his
narrow range of thought. He loves to obtain his effects by the
jarring juxtaposition of incompatibles, in true rhetorical Latin
taste. There is a fierce contempt in his 'purple rag of Majesty,'
and a curious sinister dread in the reference to virtue with her
grim, holy face. ' But we should search in vain for the epigram-
matic wisdom of Juvenal in his shortlived disciple. Oldham did
not care enough for truth, for one thing, nor, perhaps, was his
fiery temperament sufficiently philosophic. It was not through
sage reflection, not through fancy or delicacy, that he gained his
reputation, but by means of a savage vigour and intensity of passion
which could make even his melodramatic creations live. Further,
a real artistic feeling, not borrowed from his master Juvenal, is
shown in the internal coherence of each satire and in the omission
of trivialities, for which his tendency to generalisation was, in part,
responsible. Besides, although, no doubt, he looked on the plot
panic as a splendid opportunity for his peculiar talent, there is a real
sincerity and magnanimity in his attitude, which disdains petty
scandal and personal abuse. In this way, in his satires, he avoids
both the mouthing scurrility of Marston, who had earlier attempted
a satiric indignation, and, also, to an unusual degree, the character-
istic obscenity of the restoration era.
The remaining works of Oldham consist of some original poems,
some translations and two prose pieces. The last have little
interest. One, The Character of an Ugly Old Priest, consists of
dreary abuse of some unknown parson; it belongs to a species of
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
a
writing which had some vogue at the time, and, perhaps, aped, in
prose, Butler's and Cleiveland's fanciful railing; but it must be
pronounced a failure. The other, A Sunday-Thought in Sickness,
is an unimpressive religions composition, of which the most striking
passage seems influenced by the final speech in Marlowe's Faustus.
Nevertheless, it would not be difficult to believe that the soliloquy
does, in fact, represent a personal experience; it is sufficiently
natural and matter-of-fact. We know from one of his private
letters that, at one time, he had led a rakish life, but that
'experience and thinking' had made him quit that humour. ' As
to his verse, only one lyric possesses any attractiveness, The Care-
less Good Fellow, a really jovial toper's song, which raises the
suspicion that some other ballads ought to be ascribed to its
author among the mass of contemporary anonymous work. A
Satyr concerning Poetry, to which Spenser's ghost furnishes a
clumsy mise-en-scène, gives a melancholy description of the lot of
professional poets under Charles II ; but it lacks the spirit of the
attacks on the Jesuits and owes its interest to its account of
Butler's latter days. Far more important is A Satyr address'd to
a Friend that is about to leave the University, for it is the most
mature of Oldham's poems and that which most reflects the man
himself. He passes the possible professions of a scholar in review.
There is schoolmastering—there beat Greek and Latin for your
life'—but, in brief, it is an underpaid drudgery. Then, a chaplaincy
is a slavery of the most humiliating kind : 'Sir Crape' is an upper-
servant who has been educated, and who must buy the benefice
given him for 'seven years' thrall’ by marrying the superannuated
waiting-maid. Freedom at any price is to be preferred; but
Oldham's aspiration, as a poet, at least, is a small estate,' where, in
retirement, he could enjoy a few choice books and fewer friends. '
The translations have considerable merit. They are by no
.
means servile, and bear obvious traces of the author's own life.
The Passion of Byblis from Ovid has the coarse vigour of his
early work. The Thirteenth Satyr of Juvenal is noteworthy from
the characteristic way in which the note is forced. The lighter
portions of the original are abbreviated, the gloomy are expanded.
The guilty horrors of the sinner, impressive in the Latin, are
tricked out with details of vulgar fancy and become incredible.
Into Boileau's Satire touching Nobility are interpolated the
significant and creditable lines :
a
6
Do you apply your interest aright
Not to oppress the poor with wrongful might?
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
Influence of Oldham's Satires 89
Neither these versions nor others resembling them can be called
inadequate; but their chief importance lies in the fact that, in
part, they are adaptations only. The scene is transferred to
London wherever possible. Pordage takes the place of Codrus in
Juvenal's Third Satire; the Popish plot and its political sequels
are inserted into Horace's famous description of the bore. As in so
much else, so in this fashion, deliberately adopted by Oldham',
he was the forerunner of greater men. Pope was to bring the
adaptation of classic satires to contemporary circumstances to its
perfection in England. And the whole department of generalising
satire, in which the persons attacked, if they are real at all, are
of secondary interest, and where the actual course of events and
historic fact are thrust aside for the purpose of artistic unity and
unadulterated gloom, finds its first worthy exponent in Oldham.
Dryden, indeed, who nobly celebrated his young rival's genius,
maintained his own independence, and, by transforming the
narrative satire of Marvell, created a separate stream of poetry.
But, if we tell over the small forgotten satires of the later seven-
teenth century, we find the lesser poet's influence extending over a
considerable number of them. It is true that they were a ragged
train.
Yet, poor stuff as these compositions might be, they exercised
an undoubted influence on the events they illustrate. They were
written chiefly, it would seem, for the coffee-house haunter. One
Julian, a man of infamous reputation and himself a libeller, would
make a stealthy round of those establishments and distribute the
surreptitious sheets; the more dangerous libels could only be
dropped in the streets by porters, to be taken up by chance
passers-by. Not merely was the public made intensely eager for
pamphlets and squibs of all kinds in the electric political
atmosphere of the last twenty years of the seventeenth century;
but, in 1679, the Licensing act, under which anti-governmental
publications were restrained, expired for a time. Although a
decision of the judges soon gave the crown as complete powers
of suppressing unwelcome books and pamphlets as before, the
previous licensing fell into disuse, and the limitation of the number
x
6
1 Cf. his advertisement to Poems and Translations (ed. 1686): "This [a justification
for a new translation of Horace] I soon imagined was to be effected by putting Horace
into a more modern dress than hitherto he has appeared in; that is, by making him
speak as if he were living and writing now. I therefore resolved to alter the scene
from Rome to London, and to make use of English names of men, places and customs,
where the parallel would decently permit, which I conceived would give a kind of new
air to the poem, and render it more agreeable to the relish of the present age. '
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90 Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
of master-printers lapsed. The consequences of even a partial
unmuzzling of the press were almost immediately seen in a swarm
of libels, of which a vigorous complaint was made by Mr Justice
Jones in 1679 : There was never any Age, I think, more licen-
tious than this, in aspersing Governors, scattering of Libels, and
scandalous Speeches against those that are in authority? ' nd
the judge is confirmed by a ballad, The Licentiousness of the
Times, in the same year :
Now each man writes what seems good in his eyes,
And tells in bald rhymes his inventions and lies.
The Licensing act was renewed in 1685, but, apparently, without
much effect. The messenger of the press could have his eyes
'dazzled,' i. e. could be bribed not to inform the higher authorities
of a seditious publication, and it was easy to disperse copies. Thus,
when the act expired for good and all, in 1695, little real change
was made in the divulgation of the scandalous tracts with which we
are concerned.
The output of popular satire was more vitally affected by changes
in public feeling. After a prelude of compositions on the Popish
plot, poems and ballads come thick and fast during the agitation
for and against the Exclusion bill, which was to deprive James,
duke of York, of the succession and bring in 'king Monmouth. '
A series of triumphant tory productions exult over Shaftesbury
and the other whig leaders in the time of the Rye-house plot and of
the government's campaign against corporations. There succeeds
a lull, although Monmouth's rebellion, in 1685, was the occasion
of a renewed outburst; but the second period of satiric pamphlets
dates from the beginning of James II's unpopularity about the
year 1687, and reaches its fever-heat in the years of revolution,
after which a subsidence of satiric activity begins, until a less
perfervid time draws near with the peace of Ryswick.
The satires which drew their inspiration, such as it was, from
Dryden, Oldham and Marvell, were, for the most part, written in
the heroic couplet, although a Hudibrastic metre appears now and
again, and there are some semi-lyric exceptions hard to classify.
By their nature, they were almost all published anonymously, and
the veil was seldom raised later, even when the bulk of them were
reprinted in such collections as the various volumes entitled Poems
1 The Lord Chief Justice Scroggs his Speech in the King': Bench. . . 1679. Occa.
sion'd by the many Libellous Pamphlets which are publisht against Law, to the scandal
of the Government, and Publick Justice, p. 7. (Sir Thomas Jones and one or two
other judges made remarks after the speech of the Chief Justice. )
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
Lesser Satires
91
on Affairs of State. When an author's name was affixed by
the transcribers, it was, very possibly, apocryphal. Some poems
written subsequently to Marvell’s death were put down to him,
and, on principle, Rochester was debited with the most obscene.
Then, certain names are furnished by the publishers of Poems on
Affairs of State on the title-pages of that collection. We are
told that the duke of Buckingham, lord Buckhurst (later, earl
of Dorset), Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, Sprat, Drake, Gould, Brady
and Shadwell were responsible for some of the contents; but the
attribution of the individual pieces is rarely given ; nor do the
authors' names, of inferior importance as they mostly are, give
many clues in the way of style. In fact, the greater number of the
regular satires might be ascribed to two authors—distinguishable
from each other as writing, the one reasonably well, and the other
very badly. Dryden is imitated almost invariably in the metre,
Oldham frequently, and Marvell not seldom in the contents, and
there is little else left by which to judge. A single type is dominant.
A better classification than that by authors is provided in these
poems by their method of treatment and their themes. There
were employed in them a restricted number of hackneyed forms
which were often fixed by the more important poets. Cleiveland
had invented the railing character of a political opponent. Denham
and Marvell had brought in the vogue of a satiric rimed chronicle,
and to Marvell is due the variation of a visionary dialogue. Oldham
revived the related ghostly monologue, the satiric last will! , and
direct general invective. Dryden was the author o. a kind of epic,
derived from the satiric chronicle, but no longer dependent on the
news of the day, and presenting its invective in the form of
characters drawu with consummate ability. By the imitators of
these writers, the dominant forms of satire enumerated were adopted
in a more or less slavish manner together with other genres, and it
is not difficult to select examples from the best defined groups.
There were written during the period over twenty Advices to a
Painter or poems with kindred themes. For instance, one New
Advice, written in 1679, contains a grim attack on the whigs and
nonconformists after archbishop Sharp's murder. It has no mean
dramatic power, and is in strong contrast to the historic and
argumentative Good Old Cause Revived of a few months later.
Nor did the trick tire till the close of the century. A nobler form,
that of Biblical narrative, also had its misusers. Pordage, a by-
word for Grub-street poverty, wrote the tame, but not abusive,
1 Cf. vol. II, pp. 482 it.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Azaria and Hushai, in 1682, while Settle, in his Absalom Senior,
a mere echo of Dryden, among much nonsense has, here and there,
good lines, such as:
To what strange rage is Superstition driven,
That Man can outdo Hell to fight for Heaven.
Brady produced an obscene Giant's War about the same time, and
the change to a classical subject is also seen in Tarquin and
Tullia, a bitter Jacobite attack on William III and his queen.
A most effective weapon for decrying opponents was the
character, which, indeed, formed an essential part of the Biblical
narrative.
The bear having been badly mauled in the battle, the retreat
is saved by the cobbler Cerdon and by Trulla, who leads
The Warrior to a grassy Bed,
As Authors write, in a cool Shade,
Which Eglantine and Roses made,
Close by a softly murm'ring Stream,
Where lovers us'd to loll and dream.
1 There is even an instance of aposiopesis :
Which now thou shalt-bat first our care
Must see how Hudibras doth fare,
imitating the Vergilian Quos ego-sed motos, etc.
## p. 70 (#92) ##############################################
70
Samuel Butler
This is a ludicrous imitation of the first book of the Aeneid, where
Venus puts Ascanius to rest in similar surroundings.
Hudibras had been victorious in the first battle and, with the
help of the squire, had put Crowdero in the stocks; but, in a second
encounter, after the combatants have rallied their forces, he is
worsted, and, with Ralpho, takes the place of Crowdero. Even
here, while Hudibras
Cheer'd up himself with ends of Verse
And Sayings of Philosophers,
Ralpho the independent resumes his attack on the presbyterians,
and we are treated to the catch-words 'gifts,' “illumination,' 'light,'
synodical,'' orders,''constitutions,' church-censures' and so forth.
Challenged by the knight, he repeats his argument that synods are
mystical bear-gardens, in which saints are represented by the bear
and presbyters and scribes by the dogs that are set upon them.
‘Synods are whelps of the inquisition, and they have their
‘triers' (or testers), whose business it is
To cast a figure for men's Light;
To find in lines of Beard and Face
The Physiognomy of Grace,
And by the sound and twang of Nose
If all be sound within disclose.
The second part, which was published a year after the first,
proceeds uninterruptedly with the story, taking up the case of the
widow whom, in the third canto of the first part, Hudibras had after
his victory wished to gain, meeting, however, with discomfiture. The
widow, informed of this by Fame (parodied from the fourth book of
the Aeneid), determines to visit him in the stocks, and there entices
him to declare himself. Thus, we have another argument between
them, in which the knight's shameless self-seeking is exposed and
the superiority of the female sex is maintained. In proof of his
good faith, Hudibras has to promise to submit to flagellation. The
notion of whipping and the mode of carrying it out is borrowed
from Don Quixote, where Sancho Panza is called upon to endure
three thousand lashes in order to obtain the disenchantment of
Dulcinea del Toboso. Hudibras solemnly swears that he will
carry out this behest.
The next (the second) canto is introduced by the poet as
especially full of contention, and it is here that the hypocritical
casuistry of the two sects who were principally concerned in the
civil war is most clearly exposed. Hudibras, after a night's
1 Bk. II, chap. 85.
## p. 71 (#93) ##############################################
Saints in Public and in Private 71
Life Life
reflection, does not relish the idea of a flogging and turns to the
squire for his judgment on the subject. Ralpho readily proceeds
to 'enlarge upon the point. ' First, it is heathenish to offer the
sacrifice of whipping to idols, and it is sinful to do so in saints who
are sufficiently bruised and kicked by the wicked. Moreover,
The Saints may claim a Dispensation
To swear and forswear on occasion. . . .
and,
Although your Church be opposite
To ours as Black Friers are to White
In Rule and Order; yet I grant
You are a Reformado Saint.
He then, with pungent raillery, particularises breaches of faith
on the part of the ‘saints. ' They broke the allegiance and
supremacy oath, and compelled the nation to take and break the
protestation in favour of the reformed religion, to swear and
forswear the solemn league and covenant, to enter into and then
disclaim the engagement to be true to the government without king
or peers. They swore to fight for and against the king, insisting
that it was in his defence, and also for and against their own
general Esses. They swore to maintain law, religion and privilege
in parliament, not one of which is left; having sworn to maintain
the House of Lords, they turned them out as dangerous and
useless.
If this be so in public life, a saint in private life can be no more
bound by an oath.
A Saint 's of th' heavenly Realm a Peer:
And as no Peer is bound to swear,
But on the Gospel of his Honor,
Of which he may dispose as Owner;
It follows, though the thing be forgery
And false th' affirm, it is no perjury.
This suggests a gibe at the despised quakers, who, nevertheless,
are scrupulous in this matter :
These, thinking th’are obliged to Troth,
In swearing will not take an Oath.
Hudibras agrees and insists that, like a law, an oath is of no
use till it is broken. Ralpho, continuing, points out that a man
may be whipped by proxy, and
That Sinners may supply the place
Of suffering Saints is a plain Case.
Hudibras jumps at this, and at once bids Ralpho be his substitute.
## p. 72 (#94) ##############################################
72
Samuel Butler
He refuses, and, when Hudibras becomes abusive, reminds him of
the superiority of the independent party.
Remember how in Arms and Politicks
We still have worsted all your holy Tricks;
Trapann'd your party with Intregue
And took your Grandees down a peg;
New-modelld th’ Army and Cashierd
All that to Legion Smec adher'd.
(Legion Smec is intended for the presbyterians generally, under
the well known composite name ‘Smectymnuus. ') Hudibras retorts
furiously, upbraiding his squire as an upstart sectary and a
mongrel,
Such as breed out of peccant Humors
Of our own Church, like Wens and Tumours,
And, like a Maggot in a Sore,
Would that which gave it Life devour.
This, of course, refers to the numberless sects that sprang up at
this time, holding often the strangest of views.
The champions are proceeding to blows when they are inter-
rupted by a frightful noise caused by a woman being escorted in
triumph by a rabble, for having beaten her husband. Hudibras
must needs interfere, being particularly scandalised by the dis-
honour done to the sex that furnished the saints' with their first
'apostles. ' He enlarges on the help women have given to the
cause,' in language that might be a parody of Hooker, but the
rabble sets upon them with eggs and similar projectiles, so they are
glad to escape with the loss of their swords. Hudibras consoles
himself, seeing a good omen in his having been pelted with dirt:
Vespasian being dawb'd with durt
Was destin'd to the Empire for 't.
The third canto introduces a new element. By Ralpho's advice,
Hudibras entertains the notion of consulting an astrologer, Sidro-
phel, as to his prospects in the pursuit of the widow. The question
as to the permissibility of consulting a person who is scripturally
banned is decided in his favour— saints may employ a conjurer. '
The description of Sidrophel and his zany Whachum, 'an under-
witch, his Caliban,' is but little inferior to the account of Hudibras
and the squire at the beginning of the poem. Much of it is derived
from Rabelais, who has collected a great number of methods
of divination. Butler, however, makes considerable additions
from his own store, derived from the superstitions of common
6
1
1 Pref. c. III, § 13.
? Bk. III, chap. 25.
## p. 73 (#95) ##############################################
Hudibras, Part III
73
life. At first, Hudibras is impressed by the extraordinary know-
ledge displayed by the astrologer; but, afterwards, in matching his
own store of learning with it, finds himself disabused, especially
when Sidrophel quotes as a recent event a fictitious adventure of
his own, which had appeared in a spurious continuation of the first
part of Hudibras. This leads to the usual scuffle, in which the
astrologer and Whachum are worsted, and Ralpho is despatched
for a. constable; while Hudibras, under the false impression that
Sidrophel is dead, makes off, intending the squire to bear the
charge of murder and robbery, though he himself has rummaged
the astrologer's pockets.
This is the conclusion of the first and second parts of the poem,
published respectively in 1663 and 1664. The third part, which
takes up the story, was not published till 1678, and shows con-
siderable difference in the treatment of the subject.
Unlike the earlier parts, it contains very few classical allusions,
and these are of the most obvious kind, such as the Trojan horse
and Cerberus; the style, too, is smoother and requires less ex-
planation. This may be the result of experience and of hints
received by the writer in the intervening years. But the thread
of the story is taken up without interruption. The knight, having
determined to abjure Ralpho, makes his way to the widow's house;
but, unfortunately for him, the squire had formed the same resolu-
tion and forestalled him. When Hudibras appears, the lady is
.
found fully informed on all points, and is able to oppose a true
account to all his false claims of suffering on her behalf. The
controversy for and against marriage again betrays the knight's
unscrupulous selfishness, and a finishing stroke has set forth his
contemptible character, when a low knocking is heard at the gate,
and, flying in terror into a neighbouring room, he hides under a
table. He is ignominiously drawn out and cudgelled by (as he
supposes) Sidrophel's diabolical agents. Under the influence of
superstitious terrors, he confesses the motives that impelled him in
his suit, and answers to a catechism which divulges all his iniquities;
and, that nothing may be wanting to complete his humiliation, he
mistakes his squire Ralpho, who has been similarly beaten and left
in the same dark room, for a more or less friendly spirit; where-
upon, the pair make confession of the enormities perpetrated by
the rival sects in the civil wars.
The final act of the burlesque follows in the third canto of this
part, the second being a satirical account of the death of Cromwell
and of the intrigues of the various parties before the restoration.
## p. 74 (#96) ##############################################
74
Samuel Butler
2
>
The knight, having been withdrawn from his place of torture on
Ralpho's shoulders, is induced by the squire to consult a lawyer.
At first, he cries down this scheme, in order to adopt it afterwards
as his own. He adopts it ungraciously 'since he has no better
course' and consoles himself with the, often misquoted, couplet
He that complies against his Will
Is of his own Opinion still.
Butler now has an opportunity of exhibiting a lawyer in what
he probably considered a true light. The advice this person gives
exemplifies the use that was made in the older jurisprudence of
cautelae, or methods of getting round legal enactments, and
Hudibras is instructed to ply the widow with love-letters and
With Trains t inveigle and surprise
Her heedless Answers and Replies.
This counsel is followed, and we have the knight's letter and the
lady's answer, in which the latter, undoubtedly, has the best of the
argument.
The second canto of the third part stands quite by itself and
has nothing to do with the fortunes of Hudibras. It is merely
an account, more or less detailed, of the principles and politics
of the presbyterians, independents and republicans during the
anarchy before the restoration. Rebellion had slackened for want
of plunder, and presbyterian and independent were now at logger-
heads. The presbyterians were turned out, and were glad to become
itinerant preachers; they were served as they had treated the
cavaliers, and decried the anabaptists and fanatics as much as they
had done the papists and the prelatists before. Now, the inde-
pendents were prepared to pull down everything that the war had
spared and to intrigue among themselves. Meantime, the royalists,
true to church and crown, notwithstanding their sufferings, came
together again on seeing their foes divided ;
For Loyalty is still the same,
Whether it win or lose the Game;
True as a Dial to the Sun,
Although it be not shin'd upon.
'Cromwell had given up his reign, Tossed in a furious hurricane';
his feeble son had sunk under the burden of state, and now the
'saints' began their rule, but could not agree among themselves.
Some were for a king, others wished to set up the fifth mon-
archy; some were for the Rump parliament, others for a general
council of officers; some were for gospel government, others for
pulling down presbyterian synods and classes ; some, for opposing
>
## p. 75 (#97) ##############################################
The Method of Hudibras 75
the papacy, putting down saints' days and demolishing churches ;
some, for having regular ministers, others, for soldier preachers.
Some would abolish surplices and the use of the ring in the
marriage service, while re-establishing the Judaic law, and putting
an end to the use of the cross in baptism and to giving the names
of saints to churches or streets. Others disallowed the idea of
limbus patrum, where the souls of holy men rest till the judgment.
Meantime, the "quacks of government,' such as Sir Anthony
Ashley Cooper and John Lilburne, who saw the necessity of a
restoration, were discussing matters in secret conclave. Butler
gives a wonderful description of Cooper (which should be compared
with Dryden's Achitophel) and of John Lilburne, who both make
long speeches on present events and the way they should be met,
but ultimately go off into violent recriminations as representatives
of the presbyterians and the independents ; till they are suddenly
interrupted by a messenger who brings the news of the burning of
the members of the Rump in effigy. This gives an opportunity for
some rough banter on the explanation of the word rump (especially
on its Hebrew equivalent luz), which is to be found in Butler's
character entitled 'An Hermetic Philosopher'l. But, soon, the
mob appear with the purpose of hauling out the members of this
assembly and burning them. They beat an ignominious retreat,
and this ends the second canto, which has been treated last,
because it is disconnected with the main story of Hudibras.
♡ It may be well here, in retrospect, to examine Butler's methods
in the composition of his poem. The date of publication, three
years after the restoration, is sufficient to suggest that it must
have found an appreciative audience, at a time when the events to
which it referred were fresh in men's minds, and when, as we know,
a violent reaction against puritanism had set in. The learning
and scientific knowledge displayed, the turns of wit, racy metaphors
and quaint rimes have secured its continuance as an English
classic ; but, much of the legal knowledge having become obsolete,
or being too technical for ordinary readers, and many of the
minor historical allusions being forgotten, a continuous perusal
of the book requires unusual perseverance. Moreover, the length
of some of the descriptions of persons or events is trying to the
patience, although the illustrations or parallels in themselves are
pertinent and acute. The sparkling wit and humour displayed
enlightens and relieves the discussions which make up much of the
book. Humorous as are the arguments, the witty and whimsical
• Characters, etc. , ed. Waller, A. R. , p. 105.
## p. 76 (#98) ##############################################
76
Samuel Butler
comparisons serve as flashlights to bring into relief what might
otherwise become dull by reason of its length.
Thus, the peculiarities of religious tenets are illustrated by the
presbyterians, who
Compound for sins they are inclin'd to
By damning those they have no mind to,
and, in their cantankerousness, are
Still so perverse and opposite,
As if they worshipp'd God for spite;
and by the independents and anabaptists, who are dubbed 'land
and water saints'; the latter are said
To dive like wild-fowl for Salvation
And fish to catch Regeneration.
Ralpho, who has a touch of the anabaptist, when rising from his
bed, is said to 'adventure Resurrection. ' A classical comparison is
found in Achilles, who was
anabaptiz'd free of wound
All over, but the pagan heel.
The sects are ever squabbling for change of doctrine,
As if Religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
The philosophical virtuoso, Sir Kenelm Digby, is gibed at in
the description of the pouch worn by Orsin, the pugnacious
bear-ward,
Replete with strange hermetick Powder
That Wounds nine miles point-blank would solder;
and Hudibras is represented as spurring his courser,
Conveying sympathetic Speed
From Heel of Knight to Heel of Steed.
Homeric and classical similes and allusions are frequent in
the first two parts. We have the intervention of 'Pallas, who
came in shape of Rust,' to prevent a pistol going off, and ‘Mars,
who still protects the stout'; a stone that strikes Ralpho is com-
pared to that hurled by Diomed. Hudibras, in assisting Ralpho to
his feet, boasts that
Caesar himself could never say
He got two victries in a day
As I have done, that can say, twice I
In one day veni, vidi, vici.
Perhaps the comparisons from common life are more amusing;
for instance, the celebrated simile :
And like a Lobster boil'd, the Morn
From black to red began to turn;
## p. 77 (#99) ##############################################
Metre of Hudibras
77
though this is not quite equal to its original in Rabelais, who says
that lobsters are cardinalised by boiling. Very comic is the
comparison of a sword that had fallen from its owner's grip to
deserting rats.
He snatched his Whiniard up, that fled
When he was falling from his Steed,
As Rats do from a falling House.
This is Pliny's ruinis imminentibus musculi praemigrant. The
whole poem is a storehouse of such borrowings.
Dryden, in the dedication of his translation of Juvenal and
Persius (1692), while expressing admiration of Butler for being able
to put 'thought' into his verses, strongly disapproves of his choice
of octosyllabic metre.
Besides, the double Rhyme (a necessary companion of Burlesque writing)
is not so proper for manly Satir, for it turns Earnest too much into Jest, and
gives us a boyish kind of Pleasure. It tickles awkwardly with a kind of
Pain to the best sort of Readers; and we are pleased ungratefully, and if
I may say so, against our liking.
But Butler knew that ridicule was his strongest weapon, and that it
would please Charles II and his courtiers better than stately
rhythm or fiery denunciation. Rimed decasyllabic suited Dryden's
form of satire, as we see in his Absalom and Achitophel, and
was well adapted to Pope's polished antitheses; but, for gibes
and quick sallies of wit, octosyllabic metre, in competent hands,
is the most fitting instrument.
As Butler died in 1680, it is impossible to say whether he con-
templated a further instalment of his poem, so as to bring up the
tale of his cantos to twelve, after the example of the Aeneid; the
sixth canto, that is, the third of the second book, finishes, evidently,
with a view to a continuation which is provided by the third part.
But there is an incompleteness apparent in this part, suggested
first by the interpolation of the second canto, which has nothing to
do with the action of the poem, and which might fittingly have
been introduced in a subsequent continuation, while the letter
of Hudibras and the Lady's answer ought to have been incorporated
in the main story rather than be left isolated. The third part
is longer than the first by 590 lines and, if the two letters are
added, by nearly 1340. It seems not an unfair inference that, had
the satirist's life and strength. permitted, an additional part of
three cantos would have been added, to complete the normal
number of twelve, and that the third part would not have run to
so disproportionate a length.
## p. 78 (#100) #############################################
78
Samuel Butler
It remains to offer a few considerations on the main purpose of
a
Butler's satire-a frontal attack on puritanism. He probably was
unaware that a change was in progress from a personal to a
constitutional monarchy, disguised by a religious upheaval which
might be regarded as the groundswell after the storm of the
reformation. He was a fervent royalist, but kept mainly to the
religious side of the question.
The publication of the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611
had set men thinking of the treasure that had fallen into their
hands, and very many now read persistently the one book upon
which they looked as the guide to salvation. This dwelling on one
authority upset the balance of mind of many whose reading was
thus limited; and men learned to identify themselves with the
conquering, exterminating children of Israel, and to look upon
all who opposed them in politics or church doctrine as men of
Belial, Moabites, Amalekites and other adversaries of Israel and
of God, and as their own personal enemies, to be overthrown at
any cost and by any means of force or fraud. But, as Dante says
finely of another sect,
Their meditations reach not Nazareth.
Examples may readily be found of similar perversions of Scripture;
but an instance which stands out, by reason of the beauty of its
language and the terrible nature of its denunciation, occurs in
Milton's tract, Of Reformation touching Church-Discipline in
England, where the reward assured to his own partisans and
the punishment to be meted out to his adversaries are enunciated
in startling contrast? .
The mental exaltation arrived at by such homines unius libri
was extraordinary, and rendered them capable of efforts in their
enthusiasm which upset all calculation. So long as they were
sincere in their beliefs, their conduct may have been commendable;
but it is the fate of human nature, when men have attained
success by these means, to become dazzled by the height of the
pinnacle they have reached, and, when enthusiasm flags, to become
subject to deplorable lapses. And, when the spoils of the van-
quished lie at the mercy of the victors, cupidity and the baser
feelings of human nature often gain the mastery over former high
resolves. This was frequently the case in the period of the civil
war and the commonwealth.
As an unswerving royalist, a native of a county that was
1. Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints,' eto.
## p. 79 (#101) #############################################
Butler's Gifts and Powers 79
conspicuous for its loyalty, Butler could admit the divine right
of kings and allow that the king could do no wrong; but he could
not allow that the opposing party could do right, especially after
the confiscations and oppressions of which they had been guilty
towards the royalists and the episcopalian clergy. Moreover, the
Long parliament, which had included many bigh-minded patriots,
had degenerated and dwindled into the miserable, place-loving
Rump, a fit object of scorn and contempt.
Some precursors of the form and style of Hudibras have been
mentioned; but the strange rimes which it contains, and which have
helped considerably to keep it in remembrance, must not be passed
by. The curious jingles of 'ecclesiastic' and 'a stick,' 'duty' and
‘shoe-tie,' discourse' and 'whiskers,' and many more, have recalled
the poem in name at least) to many readers to whom much of the
historical detail has become obsolete. In this exercise, Butler had
a late rival in Calverley, whose metrical skill and delicately
sensitive ear would, however, not permit him to employ any
uncouth rime that his nimble fancy might suggest-every line
must ring true; whereas, in Butler's jog-trot lines, a monstrous
rime has the effect of relieving the monotony of the verse without
being out of harmony with it.
Samuel Butler, in fine, may be looked upon as a rare but erratic
genius with an extraordinary gift of satirical expression, and as a
man of great learning, who might have produced a serious poem of
merit, had the bent of his mind lain in that direction. Dryden
expressed a belief that Butler would have excelled in any other
kind of metre; and his powers in serious verse are sufficiently
attested by the following extract from Hudibras:
The Moon pulld off her veil of Light,
That hides her face by day from sight,
(Mysterious Veil, of brightness made,
That's both her lustre, and her shade)
And in the Night as freely shon,
As if her Rays had been her own:
For Darkness is the proper Sphere,
Where all false Glories use t'appear.
The twinkling Stars began to muster,
And glitter with their borrow'd luster,
While 'Sleep the weary'd World relier'd,
By counterfeiting Death reviv'di.
II, 1, 905–915. The same metaphor is employed by Milton in a magnificent
passage addressed to the Deity as the author and source of light, a subject which
always appealed strongly to the blind poet:
Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear
And dazzle heaven.
(Paradise Lost, III, 380. )
1
## p. 80 (#102) #############################################
CHAPTER III
POLITICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL SATIRE
In the period following on the restoration of Charles II, satirical
poetry on political subjects took permanent root in England. It is
true that there had already been satires, like those of Cleiveland
and the cavalier ballad-writers, written on behalf of one faction
in the state against its rival, as well as lampoons upon some foreign
enemy; but these had been sporadic, and have the appearance
of being not so much concerted attacks as outbursts of irritation
or grumblings of the governed about their rulers. Now, however,
came the beginnings of an organised, continuous depreciation of
each party by the other side, with a definite end in view, that
is, to exclude rival politicians from power by discrediting them
in public opinion. After the king's return, there became per-
ceptible certain features of English life, political, social and literary,
which specially favoured a new development of satiric literature.
In politics, we have the slow integration of two parties within the
constitution. Cavalier and puritan had held mutually irreconcil-
able views on fundamental questions, and were prepared to proceed
to extremities to uphold them. It was otherwise with their
successors, who were slow in becoming completely antagonistic,
and were then so nearly balanced in resources and so afraid of civil
war as to form the habit of toleration in fact, if not in theory.
When consistent anglicans and ci-devant presbyterians divided
between them the Long parliament of Charles II, their differences
arose chiefly on matters of practical policy on which the vanquished
could afford to await better times. Concerning the position of
monarch and church, there was no real dispute. But there were
divergences as to what measures of immediate import should be
taken by the monarch and as to what extent of conformity was
expedient in the church; and the actions of the restoration
government were sufficiently coherent to permit of its supporters
and opponents coalescing among themselves, and, in the sequel,
forming the court and the country parties. A process which, at
## p. 81 (#103) #############################################
Denham.
81
Marvell
first, was very gradual, furnished forth the two combatants in
a perennial duel.
At the same time, new social conditions came into being with
the increased preponderance of London in the national life, and
with the new and strictly urban habits which Londoners were
forming. Town and country were becoming more differentiated
than they had ever been before: and the townsmen, among whom
we may include many members of the aristocracy who spent part
of the year in London, composed an apt audience for the new kind
of literary political warfare. Coffee-house and park gave an
atmosphere where satire could flourish, while the increased facility
of communication both altered the tastes of the country gentry
by bringing them to town and maintained their allegiance to the
supremacy of London by allowing the steady transmission of news-
letters and pamphlets from the capital to the provinces.
Lastly, the revolution in literary ideals was peculiarly suitable
for satire. Here, at least, in invective on men and things, there
was ample scope for a reasoned perspicuous line, dealing with life
as it was known, and for the strongly knit couplet, which simulated
wit, even when not possessing it, and which was eminently well
adapted for sharp, hard practicalities.
It was in the years 1666-7, when the unpopularity of Clarendon
was at its height, and when the disasters of the Dutch war brought
into strong relief the faults and failures of the men in power, that
Sir John Denham began the series of Caroline political satires.
However little merit his four Instructions to a Painter, dour
travesties of Waller's adulation which bore the same name, might
possess, they started a fresh genre. Recent events, fact or fable,
were narrated in the heroic couplet with malign distortion or biting
veracity. It 'made my heart ake to read,' says Pepys of the fourth
satire in the series, “it being too sharp, and so true. ' Andrew
Marvell, who had begun as a lyric poet, followed in Denham's
wake with his Last Instructions to a Painter in 1667, the most
powerful of these satires, and, from that date until his death in
1678, remained the ablest satirist opposed to the court'. Farther
Instructions to a Painter, An Historical Poem, Advice to a
Painter, and the dialogue Britannia and Raleigh were all from
his pen; and, before he died, imitators, such as the author of the
grimly-humorous Dream of the Cabal, were springing up.
The common characteristic of these compositions was their
journalistic nature. They were riming pamphlets professing to
1 For a general account of Marvell’s literary work see ante, vol. VII, pp. 180 ff.
6
E. L. VIII.
CH. III.
## p. 82 (#104) #############################################
82
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
give actual events and court secrets, in the form either of rambling
narratives or of descriptions of persons taken seriatim. For them,
art is a subordinate factor, and their rough couplets show very
little of it.
The ways of Charles II's court and government gave
them only too much opportunity for scurrilous obscenity. Vigour,
wit and humour in a high degree are to be found in them. Marvell
had a real knowledge of affairs and statesmanlike insight. Not
personal resentment, but a strong conviction of the evils of the day
urged him on to his vituperative satire, and he stabs home with a
scientific precision. In satires of this class, however, moral in-
dignation, although it is not absent, frequently makes but a poor
show, owing to the abundance of the very filth which is brought
forward as justification for it. Of their contemporary influence,
we can hardly doubt. So they reached their aim, which was
political and not at all poetic.
A new turn was given to Charles II's reign and to English
history by the panic of the Popish plot in 1678—9. The clumsy
inventions spun from the prolific imagination of Oates succeeded
in giving the final impulse to the completion of the inchoate
parties. A definite political creed, anti-Romanism, and a definite
political aim, the exclusion of the duke of York, were furnished to
the country party, while passive obedience and the supremacy
of the anglican church were the tenets of their opponents ; and
from this contest emerge the historic whig and tory. Under these
conditions of popular passion and national division, political satire
could come fully into its own.
The first poet who entered the lists was John Oldham, and his
special genius, the circumstances of his life and the tendencies
of the day, all conspired to make him a true pioneer. In place of
the journalistic writings of Marvell and his like, half platform-
oratory, half 'leading-articles, he produced a satire, the merit and
scope of which were of a purely literary kind. He wrote satire for
satire's sake:
Satyr's my only province and delight
For whose dear sake alone I've vow'd to write:
For this I seek occasions, court abuse,
To show my parts and signalize my musel,
This was an innovation, but one which it was easier for Oldham to
introduce than for his contemporaries. The son of a nonconformist
minister, John Oldham, he was born at Shipton-Moyne, near
Tetbury in Gloucestershire, on 9 August 1653. His father sub-
· Upon a Printer.
a
## p. 83 (#105) #############################################
Oldham
83
sequently removed to Newton in Wiltshire, from which he was
ejected in 1662; thenceforward, he remained as a dissenting minister
at Wotton-under-edge in the Cotswolds, outliving his poetic son for
many years. The latter received his education at Tetbury grammar
school, and was next sent to Oxford, to St Edmund's hall, in 1670.
He obtained his bachelor's degree in May 1674, and then left the
university to reside for about a year with his father. Neither his
religious opinions at this time, we may presume, nor the inde-
pendence of character which often flashes out in his verse, would
incline him to take orders, with a view to a chaplaincy in some
noble household and a country living as a sequel. He was evidently
without means. So we find him undertaking the post of usher in
Whitgift's school at Croydon until 1678, and following this by the
more tolerable occupation of a private tutor, first to the grandsons
of a judge, Sir Edward Thurland, and, in 1681, to the son of
Sir William Hickes. This last employment brought him to the
neighbourhood of London and made him acquainted with the
literary men of the day, to whom his poems were already known.
Rochester and one or two others had, indeed, apparently visited
the young pedagogue at Croydon on the strength of his compositions
then circulating in manuscript, but nothing had come of the
interview. Now, however, the new earl of Kingston rescued
Oldham from his scholastic thraldom, became his patron and, on
occasion, his host, and offered him, we are told, the unwelcome
position of his chaplain. Be this as it may, we can well imagine
that the pert, satiric face which looks out of Oldham's portrait
belonged to an amusing companion. The profession of a man of
letters, nevertheless, in the life of the seventeenth century, could
not easily be carried on except under conditions of dependence if
not of servility, and Oldham's eagerness to escape from compliance
to them is shown by his resolve to take up medicine for a livelihood,
and by the year's study which he devoted to it. But his health
was breaking down; he is said to have been consumptive; on
9 December 1683, he fell a victim to the smallpox at Kingston's
seat, Holme-Pierrepoint near Nottingham.
This schoolmaster's life must have inclined a naturally haughty,
sardonic temperament in the direction of satire. He may, also,
have accustomed himself to make the most of a natural proneness
to indignation, in order the more to impress his pupils. And the
aloofness of his life from the capital, combined with the classical
studies necessary for his occupation, was a fit environment for the
first author of generalising satires, where incidental railing gives
642
## p. 84 (#106) #############################################
84
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
place to artistic composition without too constant a reference to
immediate facts.
He does not seem, however, to have discovered his métier at
once, for his earliest dated poem, The Dream, written in March
1677, was amatory, in a luscious, adolescent strain. This was
composed in the heroic couplet, but he was already under the
spell of Cowley and, with his usual vis animi, was putting all
his energy into Cowleyan Pindaric odes. He was not without
qualifications for the task, being both fecund in ideas and forcible
in their expression. He also brought out the defects of the metre:
his stanzas do not run easily; the difficulty of preserving a measure
of grace in a poetical form which aspired to continual hyperbole
becomes painfully obvious ; and, comparing him with Cowley, we
may say that his trumpet has a brassier sound. His vice of tur-
gidity and his often successful, but invariable, method of heaping
effect on effect to reach one great towering climax, were bred
under Cowley's influence. Among these exercises in a tuneless
metre, some three or four stand out. The early Dithyrambic,
a Drunkard's speech in a Masque, can claim dramatic fitness for
its monotonous extravagance and has a fine rhetorical close with
its reference to
the Tomb,
Nature's convenient dark Retiring-Room.
The ode Upon the Works of Ben Jonson contains just
criticism, if it falls far short of the sublime, which is needlessly
attempted. The Satyr against Vertue, however, provides a link
with its author's more enduring work. Here, the Pindarique
hyperbole is first used for a tirade against virtue and then to
express a grandiose, if rather external, conception of vice.
'Tis I the bold Columbus, only I,
Who must new Worlds in vice descry,
And fix the pillars of unpassable iniquity.
This heavyhanded irony was taken for earnest by some of its
readers, and Oldham thought it best to write later a similar high-
flown recantation. But the finest of his works in this style is the
ode To the Memory of Mr Charles Morwent, an intimate friend
whose death, in 1675, probably long preceded the finished poem.
In this panegyric, there is less bombast than appears in the others,
and its great length makes a single movement to a climax im-
possible. There are happy phrases, like the pale Cheeks do
penance in their white,' and the numerous images employed
become the subject well. On the other hand, Morwent's virtues
.
! !
## p. 85 (#107) #############################################
Satyrs upon the Jesuits
85
are so universal and unlimited as to lack verisimilitude ; but this
is a fault of the Pindaric style, and not personal to Oldham.
It was in 1678 that Oldham realised his powers-by accident,
may be-in A Satyr upon a Woman, who by her Falshood and
Scorn was the Death of my Friend. Here, he makes use of the
heroic couplet, which was his really effective medium, to express
the uttermost of hatred. His voice seems to rise to a hoarse
scream. Railing and cursing achieve a kind of attractiveness by
reaching the acme of their power, although, perhaps, a few words
would have spoken more of the heart. In amplitude and mag-
nificence, however, A Satyr upon a Woman was outdone in the
next year by his chief work, the four Satyrs upon the Jesuits.
The first of them was printed without Oldham's consent, in 1679 ;
and he published the whole series, with a few other poems, in
1681. They were without a dedication, a strong evidence of their
author's natural haughtiness in that age of fulsome flattery.
There does not seem to be any reason to doubt Oldham's
sincerity in his masterpiece. His nonconformist upbringing and
popular surroundings make it quite natural that he should have
shared in the frenzied panic of the Popish plot; while his usual
extravagance of expression and of resentment, if they make us
discount his meaning, also guarantee the reality of his sentiments.
But there is also a definite artistic bias running through the poems.
Oldham enjoyed satire by his own confession, and he was a school-
master learned in the classics. The Prologue is after Persius ; the
first satire, Garnet's Ghost, owes its inception to the prologue by
Sylla's ghost in Ben Jonson's Catiline; the third, Loyola's Will,
derives its design’from Buchanan's Franciscanus; the idea of the
fourth, St Ignatius his Image, is drawn from Horace. All these
varied debts, however, which Oldham himself owns, are thrown
into the shade by the dominating influence of Juvenal. We do
not merely find imitation of isolated passages, or even of rhetorical
artifices, like the abrupt opening of most of the satires or the
frequent employment of the climax. What is of the highest
importance is the generalising style and the habit of declamatory
highstrained invective—the love of massed and unrelieved gloom
for the sake of artistic effect. The lists of current misdeeds, the con-
temporary criticism or misrepresentation common in the satirist's
English predecessors, give place to fanciful general scenes, where
he tries to represent an imaginary ecstasy of wickedness.
The four satires have little intricacy of design. In the first, the
ghost of Garnet, the Jesuit instigator of the Gunpowder plot,
addresses a kind of diabolic homily to the Jesuits in conclave after
a
*
## p. 86 (#108) #############################################
86
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
6
Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey's murder. The second merely inveighs
against the Society in the author's own person. In the third, the
dying Loyola gives his disciples a rule of concentrated villainy.
In the fourth, his image relates the frauds supposed to be worked
in Roman Catholic worship. When we come to examine the poetic
qualities of these satires in detail, we are at once struck by the
harshness of the verse. This shows itself not so much in the
monotonous energy of the rhythm, although it would seem that it
was this which moved contemporary criticism most, as in the
extreme uncouthness of the rimes. Oldham could rime enroll'd,'
‘rul'd' and 'spoil'd,' together; and this is not an exception, but an
instance of his regular practice. In fact, he was unaware of the
cacophony, and, when his verse was criticised, took occasion to
show that he could write smoothly by the translation of two Greek
pastorals, Bion and The Lamentation for Adonis. But, in these
pieces, his bad rimes recur with little less frequency, and the lack
of
range in his melody is brought out the more by the comparison
of the refrain in Bion, apparently due to Rochester?
Come, all ye Muses, come, adorn the Shepherd's hearse
With never-fading garlands, never-dying verse-
with Oldham's own refrain in Adonis :
I mourn Adonis, the sad Loves bemoan,
The comely fair Adonis dead and gone.
To proceed from questions of technique to matter, a serious defect
of these satires is their continual exaggeration. The hyperbole of
Pindarics is transferred to them, and, their purpose being com-
minatory, the result is an atmosphere of overcharged gloom. He
accumulates horror on horror with a sole view to melodrama. The
sense of irony or ordinary humour and any faculty for dexterous
mockery seem banished from his writings. Even the satire on his
peccant printer is in the grandiose style, and his stage cannon are
fired off for the event. By consequence, dramatic fitness is entirely
absent from his original satires. He places his objurgations in
Jesuit mouths, making an extraordinary mixture of triumphant,
conscious wickedness and bigotry. The dying Loyola laments that
‘mighty Julian mist his aims,' and that thus the Bible remained
undestroyed, and declares Iscariot 'Th' example of our great
Society. Garnet's ghost gloats over the Gunpowder plot as a
rival to 'Hell's most proud exploit,' and exhorts his successors to
have only will
Like Fiends and me to covet and act ill.
Yet these professed villains are somehow occupied in fighting
1 See Oldham's advertisement to Poems and Translations, edition of 1686.
## p. 87 (#109) #############################################
Oldham as a Satirist
87
'heretics' and in saving the church. The muddle is inextricable,
and the sentiments are worthy of Hieronimo.
To Oldham's lack of dramatic instinct must be attributed his
want of variety. His only ways of creating an effect were to lead
up to a climax, to pile up the agony. In their use, indeed, he was
a master. Incredible blood and thunder fill the scene; but they, at
least, make a real clamour and smell raw. There is an expansive
energy and exaltation in such a passage as that on Charles IX and
Bartholomew's day :
He soorn'd like common murderers to deal
By parcels and piecemeal; he scorn'd retail
I th' trade of Death: whole myriads dy'd by th' great,
Soon as one single life; so quick their fate,
Their very pray’rs and wishes came too late.
These lines testify to Oldham's power of finding repeatedly
a vivid, impressive phrase, not merely by a verbal ingenuity, but
largely through a keen realisation of the ideas which entered his
narrow range of thought. He loves to obtain his effects by the
jarring juxtaposition of incompatibles, in true rhetorical Latin
taste. There is a fierce contempt in his 'purple rag of Majesty,'
and a curious sinister dread in the reference to virtue with her
grim, holy face. ' But we should search in vain for the epigram-
matic wisdom of Juvenal in his shortlived disciple. Oldham did
not care enough for truth, for one thing, nor, perhaps, was his
fiery temperament sufficiently philosophic. It was not through
sage reflection, not through fancy or delicacy, that he gained his
reputation, but by means of a savage vigour and intensity of passion
which could make even his melodramatic creations live. Further,
a real artistic feeling, not borrowed from his master Juvenal, is
shown in the internal coherence of each satire and in the omission
of trivialities, for which his tendency to generalisation was, in part,
responsible. Besides, although, no doubt, he looked on the plot
panic as a splendid opportunity for his peculiar talent, there is a real
sincerity and magnanimity in his attitude, which disdains petty
scandal and personal abuse. In this way, in his satires, he avoids
both the mouthing scurrility of Marston, who had earlier attempted
a satiric indignation, and, also, to an unusual degree, the character-
istic obscenity of the restoration era.
The remaining works of Oldham consist of some original poems,
some translations and two prose pieces. The last have little
interest. One, The Character of an Ugly Old Priest, consists of
dreary abuse of some unknown parson; it belongs to a species of
## p. 88 (#110) #############################################
88
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
a
writing which had some vogue at the time, and, perhaps, aped, in
prose, Butler's and Cleiveland's fanciful railing; but it must be
pronounced a failure. The other, A Sunday-Thought in Sickness,
is an unimpressive religions composition, of which the most striking
passage seems influenced by the final speech in Marlowe's Faustus.
Nevertheless, it would not be difficult to believe that the soliloquy
does, in fact, represent a personal experience; it is sufficiently
natural and matter-of-fact. We know from one of his private
letters that, at one time, he had led a rakish life, but that
'experience and thinking' had made him quit that humour. ' As
to his verse, only one lyric possesses any attractiveness, The Care-
less Good Fellow, a really jovial toper's song, which raises the
suspicion that some other ballads ought to be ascribed to its
author among the mass of contemporary anonymous work. A
Satyr concerning Poetry, to which Spenser's ghost furnishes a
clumsy mise-en-scène, gives a melancholy description of the lot of
professional poets under Charles II ; but it lacks the spirit of the
attacks on the Jesuits and owes its interest to its account of
Butler's latter days. Far more important is A Satyr address'd to
a Friend that is about to leave the University, for it is the most
mature of Oldham's poems and that which most reflects the man
himself. He passes the possible professions of a scholar in review.
There is schoolmastering—there beat Greek and Latin for your
life'—but, in brief, it is an underpaid drudgery. Then, a chaplaincy
is a slavery of the most humiliating kind : 'Sir Crape' is an upper-
servant who has been educated, and who must buy the benefice
given him for 'seven years' thrall’ by marrying the superannuated
waiting-maid. Freedom at any price is to be preferred; but
Oldham's aspiration, as a poet, at least, is a small estate,' where, in
retirement, he could enjoy a few choice books and fewer friends. '
The translations have considerable merit. They are by no
.
means servile, and bear obvious traces of the author's own life.
The Passion of Byblis from Ovid has the coarse vigour of his
early work. The Thirteenth Satyr of Juvenal is noteworthy from
the characteristic way in which the note is forced. The lighter
portions of the original are abbreviated, the gloomy are expanded.
The guilty horrors of the sinner, impressive in the Latin, are
tricked out with details of vulgar fancy and become incredible.
Into Boileau's Satire touching Nobility are interpolated the
significant and creditable lines :
a
6
Do you apply your interest aright
Not to oppress the poor with wrongful might?
## p. 89 (#111) #############################################
Influence of Oldham's Satires 89
Neither these versions nor others resembling them can be called
inadequate; but their chief importance lies in the fact that, in
part, they are adaptations only. The scene is transferred to
London wherever possible. Pordage takes the place of Codrus in
Juvenal's Third Satire; the Popish plot and its political sequels
are inserted into Horace's famous description of the bore. As in so
much else, so in this fashion, deliberately adopted by Oldham',
he was the forerunner of greater men. Pope was to bring the
adaptation of classic satires to contemporary circumstances to its
perfection in England. And the whole department of generalising
satire, in which the persons attacked, if they are real at all, are
of secondary interest, and where the actual course of events and
historic fact are thrust aside for the purpose of artistic unity and
unadulterated gloom, finds its first worthy exponent in Oldham.
Dryden, indeed, who nobly celebrated his young rival's genius,
maintained his own independence, and, by transforming the
narrative satire of Marvell, created a separate stream of poetry.
But, if we tell over the small forgotten satires of the later seven-
teenth century, we find the lesser poet's influence extending over a
considerable number of them. It is true that they were a ragged
train.
Yet, poor stuff as these compositions might be, they exercised
an undoubted influence on the events they illustrate. They were
written chiefly, it would seem, for the coffee-house haunter. One
Julian, a man of infamous reputation and himself a libeller, would
make a stealthy round of those establishments and distribute the
surreptitious sheets; the more dangerous libels could only be
dropped in the streets by porters, to be taken up by chance
passers-by. Not merely was the public made intensely eager for
pamphlets and squibs of all kinds in the electric political
atmosphere of the last twenty years of the seventeenth century;
but, in 1679, the Licensing act, under which anti-governmental
publications were restrained, expired for a time. Although a
decision of the judges soon gave the crown as complete powers
of suppressing unwelcome books and pamphlets as before, the
previous licensing fell into disuse, and the limitation of the number
x
6
1 Cf. his advertisement to Poems and Translations (ed. 1686): "This [a justification
for a new translation of Horace] I soon imagined was to be effected by putting Horace
into a more modern dress than hitherto he has appeared in; that is, by making him
speak as if he were living and writing now. I therefore resolved to alter the scene
from Rome to London, and to make use of English names of men, places and customs,
where the parallel would decently permit, which I conceived would give a kind of new
air to the poem, and render it more agreeable to the relish of the present age. '
## p. 90 (#112) #############################################
90 Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
of master-printers lapsed. The consequences of even a partial
unmuzzling of the press were almost immediately seen in a swarm
of libels, of which a vigorous complaint was made by Mr Justice
Jones in 1679 : There was never any Age, I think, more licen-
tious than this, in aspersing Governors, scattering of Libels, and
scandalous Speeches against those that are in authority? ' nd
the judge is confirmed by a ballad, The Licentiousness of the
Times, in the same year :
Now each man writes what seems good in his eyes,
And tells in bald rhymes his inventions and lies.
The Licensing act was renewed in 1685, but, apparently, without
much effect. The messenger of the press could have his eyes
'dazzled,' i. e. could be bribed not to inform the higher authorities
of a seditious publication, and it was easy to disperse copies. Thus,
when the act expired for good and all, in 1695, little real change
was made in the divulgation of the scandalous tracts with which we
are concerned.
The output of popular satire was more vitally affected by changes
in public feeling. After a prelude of compositions on the Popish
plot, poems and ballads come thick and fast during the agitation
for and against the Exclusion bill, which was to deprive James,
duke of York, of the succession and bring in 'king Monmouth. '
A series of triumphant tory productions exult over Shaftesbury
and the other whig leaders in the time of the Rye-house plot and of
the government's campaign against corporations. There succeeds
a lull, although Monmouth's rebellion, in 1685, was the occasion
of a renewed outburst; but the second period of satiric pamphlets
dates from the beginning of James II's unpopularity about the
year 1687, and reaches its fever-heat in the years of revolution,
after which a subsidence of satiric activity begins, until a less
perfervid time draws near with the peace of Ryswick.
The satires which drew their inspiration, such as it was, from
Dryden, Oldham and Marvell, were, for the most part, written in
the heroic couplet, although a Hudibrastic metre appears now and
again, and there are some semi-lyric exceptions hard to classify.
By their nature, they were almost all published anonymously, and
the veil was seldom raised later, even when the bulk of them were
reprinted in such collections as the various volumes entitled Poems
1 The Lord Chief Justice Scroggs his Speech in the King': Bench. . . 1679. Occa.
sion'd by the many Libellous Pamphlets which are publisht against Law, to the scandal
of the Government, and Publick Justice, p. 7. (Sir Thomas Jones and one or two
other judges made remarks after the speech of the Chief Justice. )
## p. 91 (#113) #############################################
Lesser Satires
91
on Affairs of State. When an author's name was affixed by
the transcribers, it was, very possibly, apocryphal. Some poems
written subsequently to Marvell’s death were put down to him,
and, on principle, Rochester was debited with the most obscene.
Then, certain names are furnished by the publishers of Poems on
Affairs of State on the title-pages of that collection. We are
told that the duke of Buckingham, lord Buckhurst (later, earl
of Dorset), Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, Sprat, Drake, Gould, Brady
and Shadwell were responsible for some of the contents; but the
attribution of the individual pieces is rarely given ; nor do the
authors' names, of inferior importance as they mostly are, give
many clues in the way of style. In fact, the greater number of the
regular satires might be ascribed to two authors—distinguishable
from each other as writing, the one reasonably well, and the other
very badly. Dryden is imitated almost invariably in the metre,
Oldham frequently, and Marvell not seldom in the contents, and
there is little else left by which to judge. A single type is dominant.
A better classification than that by authors is provided in these
poems by their method of treatment and their themes. There
were employed in them a restricted number of hackneyed forms
which were often fixed by the more important poets. Cleiveland
had invented the railing character of a political opponent. Denham
and Marvell had brought in the vogue of a satiric rimed chronicle,
and to Marvell is due the variation of a visionary dialogue. Oldham
revived the related ghostly monologue, the satiric last will! , and
direct general invective. Dryden was the author o. a kind of epic,
derived from the satiric chronicle, but no longer dependent on the
news of the day, and presenting its invective in the form of
characters drawu with consummate ability. By the imitators of
these writers, the dominant forms of satire enumerated were adopted
in a more or less slavish manner together with other genres, and it
is not difficult to select examples from the best defined groups.
There were written during the period over twenty Advices to a
Painter or poems with kindred themes. For instance, one New
Advice, written in 1679, contains a grim attack on the whigs and
nonconformists after archbishop Sharp's murder. It has no mean
dramatic power, and is in strong contrast to the historic and
argumentative Good Old Cause Revived of a few months later.
Nor did the trick tire till the close of the century. A nobler form,
that of Biblical narrative, also had its misusers. Pordage, a by-
word for Grub-street poverty, wrote the tame, but not abusive,
1 Cf. vol. II, pp. 482 it.
## p. 92 (#114) #############################################
92
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Azaria and Hushai, in 1682, while Settle, in his Absalom Senior,
a mere echo of Dryden, among much nonsense has, here and there,
good lines, such as:
To what strange rage is Superstition driven,
That Man can outdo Hell to fight for Heaven.
Brady produced an obscene Giant's War about the same time, and
the change to a classical subject is also seen in Tarquin and
Tullia, a bitter Jacobite attack on William III and his queen.
A most effective weapon for decrying opponents was the
character, which, indeed, formed an essential part of the Biblical
narrative.
