Thus, in Sir
Edmundbury Godfrey's Ghost, written about 1679, by some whig,
whose gift of sardonic wit makes us curious to know his name,
the ghost is made to appear to Charles II.
Edmundbury Godfrey's Ghost, written about 1679, by some whig,
whose gift of sardonic wit makes us curious to know his name,
the ghost is made to appear to Charles II.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
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. One of the wittiest was written by the duke of Bucking-
ham, in his Advice to a Painter, against his rival Arlington; one
of the loftiest is Shaftesbury's Farewell, a kind of inimical epitaph
on the whig leader's death in Holland (“What! A republic air, and
yet so quick a grave ? '). Shadwell has the disgrace of unsurpassed
virulence in his Medal of John Bayes (1682), which drew upon him
a heavy punishment from the quondam friend whom he lampooned.
The most cutting, perhaps, was the sham Panegyricon King
William by the hon. J. H[oward ? ). Nor should The Man of no
Honour, where James II's subservient courtiers are assailed, be
forgotten. An argumentative style is to be discerned in the
description of the views of The Impartial Trimmer, which, in fact,
is a whig manifesto of 1682, and where real knowledge and a
weighty personality seem to transpire. Thus, the gap is bridged
to the unadulterated argument which is to be found in the earlier
tory Poem on the Right of Succession or in Pordage's spiritless
attack on persecution, The Medal Revers'd (1682).
More imaginative in conception are the visions and ghosts ;
Hodge's Vision (1679) is a diatribe on the court; The Battle
Royal (1687) is a nonconformist burlesque of papist and parson.
The Waking Vision (1681) contains a dialogue in Oldham's
undramatic manner between Shaftesbury and Monmouth. A
loquacious phantom appears in most of the type.
Thus, in Sir
Edmundbury Godfrey's Ghost, written about 1679, by some whig,
whose gift of sardonic wit makes us curious to know his name,
the ghost is made to appear to Charles II. Humour, on the other
hand, is the special talent of the tory who wrote Tom Thynne's
Ghost in Hudibrastic metre (1682). Hell, at any rate, is under a
despot, and the dead whigs have no scope for their energies,
For none his boundless power questions,
Or makes undutiful suggestions.
Charles II himself was called on for ghostly comment after his
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
Dialogues and Squibs
93
death. The angry tory who wrote Caesar's Ghost (c. 1687) begins
quite well and impressively with the rise of the royal shade from
the tomb, but tails off into the usual scurrilities, this time against
the officers of James II's army at Hounslow heath. The Ghost of
King Charles II (? c. 1692) also gives advice, written, possibly, by
some disgusted whig, to the pensive prince, not given to replies. '
William III.
From the ghost to the last will is a natural transition, but,
whereas the ghost is almost always tragic, and with good reason,
too, according to the authors, the will is sprightly and squiblike, if
rather hideous, in its fun. The best, perhaps, is the attack on
Shaftesbury in exile, The Last Will and Testament of Anthony K.
of Poland (1682). The legacies, some of which are heartlessly
enough invented, satirise the legatees as well as the great whig
leader himself, and there is no denying the stinging wit of the
whole.
Next to these sham dramatic poems we may notice the dialogues,
of which Marvell’s Dialogue between two Horses (1675) is justly
celebrated. The witty humour of the piece blends well with an
only too serious political indictment of Charles and his brother,
and we may excuse the doggerel lilting metre as an echo of the
clumsy canter of his brass and marble horses. Rochester, too,
wrote a short dialogue, The Dispute, on the duke of York's
conversion to Catholicism, which contains his accustomed rankling
sting. . Curiously enough, there is a satire or two, consisting of
alternate recriminations between the duchess of Portsmouth and
Nell Gwynn (1682), conducted much to the advantage of the English
and 'protestant' mistress : but, in this species, the palm should be
assigned to the octosyllabic Dialogue between James II and his
Italian queen, which is replete with vulgar humour.
Scarcely to be distinguished from the dialogues is the ill-
defined class of squibs. Their metres are varied. Some are lyric
in character and form a link between compositions intended for
reading and ballads intended for singing: some are in octo-
syllabic lines of a Hudibrastic kind. Indeed, although they go
naturally together, it is hard to give a reason for thus grouping
them; except that invective and indignation are markedly sub-
ordinate in them to the wish to ridicule and scoff. 'Eminent
hands, as the booksellers would have said, were engaged in their
production. Marvell made a striking success of the spirited ballad
quatrains of his Poem on the Statue in Stocks-market (1672). Each
stanza contains a separate conceit on the offering of a wealthy
6
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Londoner to Charles II, a statue of Sobieski (of all people) being
altered for the purpose to suit Charles's features. As usual with
Marvell, the chief political grievances of the day are catalogued,
but the prevailing tone of the indictment is one of witty pleasantry.
Two of Rochester's poems also may come under this heading,
The History of Insipids (1676), which is the least revolting
among the effusions said to have led to his banishment from court.
Its cold and effective malice was, at least, dangerous enough to
cause some royal displeasure. Later, he displayed the same
mordant wit against the whigs in the epigrammatic Commons'
Petition to the King (1679). Still better as a work of art, and not
so envenomed in substance, is the lampoon On the Young States-
men (1680), otherwise, the 'Chits,' who were Charles II's chief
advisers at the close of his reign. If not by Dryden, as the
publishers claimed, the polish of this squib seems to indicate
Rochester grown ripe. Two octosyllabic pieces also demand notice,
one, On the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture (1682), for its wrath-
ful pungency, the other, a parody of King James's Declaration
(1692), by Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, for its tolerant victorious
humour. Lastly comes a group of poems in three-lined single-rimed
stanzas. The metre was peculiarly suitable for sententious argument
or a string of accusations, and some excellent talent went to their
production. Instances of their effective employment may be seen
in The Melancholy Complaint of Dr Titus Oates, and in The
Parliament dissolved at Oxford (1681), a pointed, if unmetrical,
production
Along with literary satires, attempts, in this nature, of the
dramatist Thomas Otway may be ranked. Their form is somewhat
unusual, and, in consequence, they do not easily fall into any of the
groups distinguished above. The earlier is a Pindaric ode, The
Poet's Complaint to his Muse, written when, in 1679, the duke
of York was banished, in consequence of the agitation about the
Popish plot. Very long, hyperbolical, straggling and unmelodious,
the Complaint is not an attractive piece of writing ; but the name
of its author and the furious attack on the potent ‘Libell,' who, of
course, is a whig satirist only, lend it interest. Otway's later
satiric effort, the comic scenes in Venice Preserved (1682), where
senator Antonio represents Shaftesbury, only shows to what depths
of ineptitude he could descend"; of the power to caricature he
seems devoid.
Otway, in his Complaint, mentions the kinds of poetry that
1 See chap. VII, post.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Ballads
95
'Libell' was proficient in, "Painter's Advices, Letanies, Ballads.
The first of these represent the would-be literary work intended
for reading. The other two species, which had been, earlier, em-
ployed in mockery of the ruling puritans, were the property of the
ballad-monger, and were hawked about the country to be chanted
at street-corners and in taverns. Their manner is, therefore, far
more popular than that of the semi-literary satires. In scurrility,
indeed, there is little to choose between them. If anything, the
ballads have a poorer vocabulary, and hurl a few customary
epithets from Billingsgate at their opponents with a smaller
amount of detailed obscenity than opportunities of the heroic
couplet allow. But their strokes of criticism are mainly more
coarsely done and not so strongly bitten in: their humour is more
rollicking and clownish; their occasional argumentation more
rough and ready; and, in it, the ruin of trade,' due, of course, to
the wicked whigs or tories as the case might be, finds an additional
prominence.
Since they were intended for popular recitation and for an
immediate effect, it was necessary that they should be readily sung,
and this end was attained by fitting them to tunes which were
already well known and popular. This was not very difficult to
achieve. A certain number of ballad-tunes were old favourites
throughout the country; and the more successful operas or plays
of Charles II's reign frequently left behind them some air or other
which caught the general fancy and was sung everywhere. Both
these sources were put under contribution by ballad-makers, and
it was only rarely that a new tune had to be expressly composed
for a ballad, and, being composed, was admitted into the singer's
répertoire. The consequence was that a flavour of parody pervaded
almost all the political ballads of the day. It was tempting to
adopt words and phrases together with the tune; and there
resulted, for instance, a whimsical contrast between 'Hail to the
knight of the post,' directed against Titus Oates, and ‘Hail to the
myrtle shades' which began the original ballad.
Among ballad-tunes, the litany stands in the front rank. With
its three riming lines and short refrain, it was, in fact, the most
successful variation of the three-lined satiric verse.
Its name was
taken from its original refrain ‘Which nobody can deny,' which
was often superseded, especially when the attack was most bitter,
by the litany-prayers Libera nos, Domine, Quaesumus te, Domine,
or their English equivalents. A hortatory, and less implacable,
satire, which came into vogue in the later days of Charles, altered
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
the refrain again to 'This is the Time. They were mainly, however,
sung to the one tune, although The Cavallilly Man, a cavalier
air, was occasionally used, when the lilt of the three lines and their
length were suitable. The usual type may be seen by one stanza of
the tory Loyal Subject's Litany (1680):
From the Dark-Lanthorn Plot, and the Green-Ribbon Club;
From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub;
From reforming a Prince by the model of Job,
Libera nos, Domine !
The other ballad-tunes may be conveniently divided into old and
new. Of the first class, two were much more popular than their
.
congeners. Packington's Pound was a lilting tune, fitted for a
scheme of words not unlike parts of The Ingoldsby Legends, and a
ready vehicle for broad and dashing fun. Its vogue continued
unabated till the reign of queen Anne, and some of the best ballad-
satires were written in it, the more easily as it admitted some
small variations of structure in the verse. Almost equal to
Packington's Pound in general favour was Hey, boys, up go we !
or Forty-one. This accompanied an eight-lined stanza of vigorous
movement, octosyllabic and hexasyllabic lines being alternated.
The eighth line was usually the refrain, such as 'Hey, boys, up
go we ! ' or 'The clean contrary way,' or some special one for the
occasion; but it might remain undistinguished from the rest of the
verse. Other old tunes only need a mention; there were used, for
example, Chevy Chase, Sir Eglamore, Eighty-eight, Cock Lawrel,
Ohone, ohone, Fortune, my foe, The Jolly Beggars, Ill tell thee,
Dick and Phillida flouts me, all of which date from before the
commonwealth.
Tom D'Urfey appears to have been the most popular ballad-
composer under the restoration. Tunes of his, like Sawney will
ne'er be my love again, Now the fights done, Hark, the thund ring
cannons roar and Burton Hall, were at once made part of the
ballad-monger's stock-in-trade, along with other competitors, such
as Digby's Farewell, Russell's Farewell, How unhappy is Phyllis
in love, Lay by your pleading, and a tory political tune, Now ye
Tories that glory. All these, however, are outdone in importance
by Purcell's Lilliburlero, which conferred an instant and extra-
ordinary success on Thomas lord Wharton's doggerel rimes, and
was, of course, employed for still poorer effusions afterwards. Here,
we reach the high-water mark of the ballad's effectiveness, and,
fortunately, know to whom both music and words are due? .
1 Chappell, W. , Old English Popular Music, ed. Wooldridge, 1893, vol. 11, p. 59, and
Macaulay, Hist. of England (5th ed. ), vol. II, p. 428.
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
Ballads
97
With regard to most ballads, however, we are left in the dark
as to their authorship. Who was the reasoning tory humourist
who wrote the first two parts of A Narrative of the Popish Plot
(1679—80), or the ‘lady of quality' who continued his work? What
whig wrote the wrathful Tories Confession (1682), the disgusted
Satyr on Old Rowley (1680—1), or the scornful Lamentable Lory
(1684 ? ) (against Laurence Hyde), or the drily humorous Sir T.
Jenner's Speech to his Wife and Children (1688-9) ? Nocte
premuntur. And along with the writers of these are forgotten
their tory antagonists, the authors of the gay invective of A New
Presbyterian Ballad (1681), or the fiery Dagon's Fall (1682)
against Shaftesbury, the exulting Tories' Triumph (1685) or the
witty lampoon on bishop Burnet, The Brawny Bishop's Complaint
(c. 1698). Yet the names of the ballad-makers, even when known,
are rather disappointing. It was Charles Blount, the deist, who is
responsible for the clever and haughty Sale of Esau's Birthright
on the Buckingham election of 1679. William Wharton, a son of
Philip, fourth lord Wharton, although reputed dull, was the author
of A New Song of the Times (1683), one of the most brilliant of
whig squibs. Walter Pope, a physician and astronomer, wrote The
Catholic Ballad (1674), which displays genial pleasantry. Another
physician, Archibald Pitcairne, translated and improved the Jacobite
De Juramento illicito (1689). The 'protestant joiner,' Stephen
College, perpetrated some yapping pasquinades. And we find
some professionals. There was Thomas Jordan, the city poet, who
shows a fine lyrical feeling in The Plotting Papists' Litany (1680),
which stands quite apart in structure from the Which nobody can
deny series. His successor as city poet, Matthew Taubman, edited
a volume of tory compositions, of some of which he was presumably
author. Finally, the courtier, song-writer and dramatist, Tom
D'Urfey, composed several tory songs, all of them facile and tune-
ful, and one, The Trimmer (c. 1690), sardonically witty. D'Urfey
furnishes us with a sidelight on the audience of these ballads, when
he tells how he sang one, in 1682, with King Charles at Windsor ;
he holding one part of the paper with me. ' On one side or another,
they appealed to all the nation, and their comparative popularity
was the best gauge of public opinion.
But there were good reasons for the anonymity of this political
literature, poems, ballads and tracts. If the censorship had lapsed
or was inefficient, the law of libel gave the government ample
means for punishing the publishers and authors of anything tending
to civil division, and, naturally, while the whigs had most present
7
a
E. L. VIII
OH. III
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
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Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
reason to fear, the tories did not forget the possibility of a turn of
the wheel. The last four years of Charles II saw a number of
prosecutions of booksellers like Nathaniel Thompson, Richard
Janeway, Benjamin Harris and others, and, although these cases do
not seem to have been very efficient deterrents, they tended to
make anonymity advisable as an obvious and easy precaution.
Meanwhile, a straggling and feebler race of prose satires existed
under the shadow of the poems and ballads. Its comparatively
scanty numbers and its weakly condition were, may be, due to the
fact that prose satire could not be disentangled without difficulty
from sober argument. The seventeenth century pamphleteer kept no
terms with his political or ecclesiastical adversaries. His reasoning
is interlarded with invective, and, if possible, with ridicule. Yet
the serious content of his tract may remain obvious, and a
traits of satire are not sufficient to change its classification. In
tracing the course of pure satire, therefore, we are left mostly to a
series of secondrate pamphlets, the authors of which, it would seem,
were distrustful of their argumentative powers and unable to
employ the more popular device of rime.
One amphibious contribution, The Rehearsal Transpros'd
(1672–3), of Andrew Marvell, deserves mention on its satiric
aspect. Though that book belongs essentially to the region of
serious political controversy, its author's design of discrediting his
opponent by ridicule and contumely is too apparent throughout for
it to be excluded from satire. As such, it possesses undeniable
merits. Marvell understood the difficult art of bantering the enemy.
He rakes up Parker's past history, sometimes with a subdued
fun—as when he says that his victim, in his puritan youth, was
wont to put more graves in his porridge than the other fasting
'Grewellers'-sometimes with a more strident invective. He can
rise to a fine indignation when he describes Parker's ingratitude to
Milton. And there is a shrewdness in his humour which brings over
the reader to his side. Yet, with all this, the wit of his book is the
elder cavilling wit of the chop-logic kind. It is a succession of
quips, which need a genius not possessed by Marvell to keep their
savour amidst a later generation. That he had high powers in
humorous comedy was shown in his parody of Charles II, His
Majesty's Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament
(1675). Its audacious mockery and satiric grasp of a situation
1. Graves' or 'greaves,' a fatty substance or juice. The word is clearly connected
both with gravy' and the composition used in graving'a ship.
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
Satirical Narratives and Dialogues 99
>
preserve its fun from evaporating, and exhibit a dramatic faculty
we barely expect in the musing poet of The Garden.
A favourite form of prose, as of poetic, satire was the narrative.
Cabala (1663) is a fine example. Here, we are given delightful
sham minutes of meetings held by the leading nonconformists in
1662. Sardonic and malicious as it is, it includes burlesque of
great talent, as when the well-affected' minister is described as
one who indeed complieth with the public injunction of the
Church, yet professeth they are a burthen and a grief to him. ' It
has a distinct affinity with a much later composition, which, how-
ever, is by a whig and directed against the Jacobites, A true and
impartial Narrative of the Dissenters' New Plot (1690), where the
extreme high church view of English history since the reformation
is parodied in a brilliant, unscrupulous fashion. The gay, triumphant
irony and solemn banter of the piece only set off to better advantage
the serious argument which is implied and, at last, earnestly stated.
The List of goods for sale is a very slight thing compared to
elaborate productions like the above, but it gave opportunity for
skilful thrusts and lasted throughout the period. Books were the
objects most frequently described, but other items appear, as in the
Advertisement of a Sale of choice Goods, which dates from about
1670. One lot consists of 'Two rich Royal Camlet Clokes, faced
with the Protestant Religion, very little the worse for wearing,
valued at 4l. to advance half a Crown at each bidding'; which
must have amused Charles II, if not his brother.
The dialogue was a favourite form for polemic in the party
newspapers. It appears in A Pleasant Battle between tro
Lap-dogs of the Utopian Court (1681), where Nell Gwynn's dog,
following the example of his mistress, wins the day against the
duchess of Portsmouth's. So, too, there are several characters,
like that written by Oldham, but none worth special notice, save
that the railing style gives place to a more polished invective.
Another form, the parable, was in favour under William III. It
was a kind of prolonged fable, where personages of the day appear
as various birds and beasts. Thus, in the nonconformist whig
Parable of the Three Jackdaws (1696), which, perhaps, is identical
with that of The Magpies by Bradshaw, the eagle stands for
Charles II, the falcon for Monmouth, archbishop Sancroft is called
a ‘metropolitical Magpye’ and the dissenters are styled 'blackbirds
and nightingales. '
Along with these distinct genres there were printed some satires
* Cf. Dunton, J. , The Life and Errors of J. D. vol. I, p. 182.
560466 A
7-2
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
IOO
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
hard to classify, pretended documents, sham letters and so forth.
The Humble Address of the Atheists (1688) to James II, a wbig
concoction, is superior to most of its fellows, although it has but
scanty merit. Some way below it rank the mock whig Letter from
Amsterdam to a Friend in England (1678) and Father La Chaise's
Project for the Extirpation of Heretics (1688), in which the
opponents of the two factions decorated what they imagined were
the designs of whig or papist with products of a lurid fancy.
When we try to sum up the impression which these satires,
in verse or prose, give us, we are struck at once by the low place
which they hold as literature. Witty they often are, and with
a wit which improves. We change from flouts and jeers and
artificial quips to humorous sarcasm, which owes its effect to the
contrast of the notions expressed, and to its ruthless precision.
But even this is not a very clear advance; the quip had, perhaps,
always been a little popular form, and mere jeering continued to
be the staple satire. In fact, except Oldham, who stands apart,
these authors did not aim at a literary mark. They were the
skirmishers of a political warfare, bandying darts all the more
poisoned and deadly because it was known that most would miss
their billet. Many of them were hirelings with little interest in
the causes they espoused. Their virulence, which seems nowadays
hideous, was mainly professional : and the lewd abuse which fills
those of them which are in rime was accordingly discounted by the
public. It was not a compassionate age. The very danger of the
libeller's trade under the censorship made him the more un-
scrupulous in his choice of means. The tories, as a matter of
course, harp continually on Shaftesbury's ulcer, the result of a
carriage accident, and the silver tap which drained it was the
source of continual nicknames and scoffs : and the whigs are equal
sinners. A debauched riot reigns in most of the poetical satires,
degraded into an absolute passion for the purulent and the ugly.
The writers of them, it would appear, worshipped and loved
animalism for its own sake, not the least when they searched
through every depth of evil in order to defame their adversaries in
the most brutal way possible.
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
CHAPTER IV
THE EARLY QUAKERS
The rise of the quaker movement in England, which began
with the public preaching of George Fox, just about the time of
the execution of Charles I, was marked by a surprising outburst
of literary activity. The new conception of religion was pro-
pagated with extraordinary zeal, and seemed likely at one time
not only to change the face of English Christianity but to mould,
after the quaker pattern, the religious life of the American
colonies. It was essentially the rediscovery, by men and women
whose whole training and environment were puritan, of the
mystical element which lies close to the heart of Christianity, but
which puritanism, with all its strength, had strangely missed. It
was a revivified consciousness of God, bringing with it the con-
viction that the essence of Christ's religion is not to be found in
submission to outward authority, whether of church or of Bible,
but in a direct experience of God in the soul, and in a life lived in
obedience to His will inwardly revealed.
The overmastering enthusiasm kindled by the new experience,
due, as Fox and his followers believed, to the immediate inspira-
tion of the Holy Spirit, impelled them to make it known by pen
as well as voice. Rude countrymen from the fells of Westmorland,
as well as scholars with a university training-even boys like
James Parnell, who died a martyr in Colchester castle at the age
of nineteen-became prolific writers as well as fervent preachers
of mystical experience and practical righteousness. Books and
pamphlets, broadsheets and public letters, followed one another in
rapid succession, setting forth the new way of life, defending it
against its adversaries, and pleading for liberty of conscience and
of worship. The organisation by which they contrived to get so
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
IO2
The Early Quakers
large a mass of writing into circulation is not yet fully understood'.
But the fact that they found readers affords noteworthy evidence
of the ferment of men's minds in that day, and of the dominance
over their thoughts and lives of the religious interest.
Of all this vast output, there is not much that could possibly,
by its intrinsic qualities, find any permanent place in English
literature ; its chief interest now is for the curious student of
religious history. Nor can it be said to have influenced in any
appreciable degree the intellectual outlook of English-speaking
peoples, except in so far as it was one of the unnoticed factors in
the evolution of religious thought from the hard dogmatism of
puritan days to a more liberal and ethical interpretation of
Christianity. Most of the early quaker writings, having served
their temporary purpose, were read, so far as they continued to
be used at all, by the adherents of the new conception of religious
life, and by few or none beside.
That is only what would naturally be expected, when we look
at the forces that gave birth to these writings and at the con-
ditions under which they were poured forth. The purpose of these
numerous authors was not intellectual, and not (primarily at
least) theological, but experimental. They felt an inward com-
pulsion to make known to the world 'what God had done for
them,' that they might draw others into the same experience, and
into the kind of life to which it led. Moreover, the sense of
direct Divine communion and guidance, in which they lived, found
expression in terms that too often seemed to deny to the Christian
soul any place for the artistic faculty, and even for the develop-
ment of the intellectual powers. In striving to set forth what
they had discovered, they used, without transcending it, the
philosophical dualism of their day, which divided the world of
experience into water-tight compartments, the natural and the
spiritual, the human and the Divine. The terminology of the
seventeenth century, even if it served well enough to set forth
the 'religions of authority,' broke down when the quakers tried
to use it to expound their religion of the Spirit. ' The conception
of the Divine immanence, in the light of which alone they could
have found adequate expression for their experience, had been
well-nigh lost.
· 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. One of the wittiest was written by the duke of Bucking-
ham, in his Advice to a Painter, against his rival Arlington; one
of the loftiest is Shaftesbury's Farewell, a kind of inimical epitaph
on the whig leader's death in Holland (“What! A republic air, and
yet so quick a grave ? '). Shadwell has the disgrace of unsurpassed
virulence in his Medal of John Bayes (1682), which drew upon him
a heavy punishment from the quondam friend whom he lampooned.
The most cutting, perhaps, was the sham Panegyricon King
William by the hon. J. H[oward ? ). Nor should The Man of no
Honour, where James II's subservient courtiers are assailed, be
forgotten. An argumentative style is to be discerned in the
description of the views of The Impartial Trimmer, which, in fact,
is a whig manifesto of 1682, and where real knowledge and a
weighty personality seem to transpire. Thus, the gap is bridged
to the unadulterated argument which is to be found in the earlier
tory Poem on the Right of Succession or in Pordage's spiritless
attack on persecution, The Medal Revers'd (1682).
More imaginative in conception are the visions and ghosts ;
Hodge's Vision (1679) is a diatribe on the court; The Battle
Royal (1687) is a nonconformist burlesque of papist and parson.
The Waking Vision (1681) contains a dialogue in Oldham's
undramatic manner between Shaftesbury and Monmouth. A
loquacious phantom appears in most of the type.
Thus, in Sir
Edmundbury Godfrey's Ghost, written about 1679, by some whig,
whose gift of sardonic wit makes us curious to know his name,
the ghost is made to appear to Charles II. Humour, on the other
hand, is the special talent of the tory who wrote Tom Thynne's
Ghost in Hudibrastic metre (1682). Hell, at any rate, is under a
despot, and the dead whigs have no scope for their energies,
For none his boundless power questions,
Or makes undutiful suggestions.
Charles II himself was called on for ghostly comment after his
## p. 93 (#115) #############################################
Dialogues and Squibs
93
death. The angry tory who wrote Caesar's Ghost (c. 1687) begins
quite well and impressively with the rise of the royal shade from
the tomb, but tails off into the usual scurrilities, this time against
the officers of James II's army at Hounslow heath. The Ghost of
King Charles II (? c. 1692) also gives advice, written, possibly, by
some disgusted whig, to the pensive prince, not given to replies. '
William III.
From the ghost to the last will is a natural transition, but,
whereas the ghost is almost always tragic, and with good reason,
too, according to the authors, the will is sprightly and squiblike, if
rather hideous, in its fun. The best, perhaps, is the attack on
Shaftesbury in exile, The Last Will and Testament of Anthony K.
of Poland (1682). The legacies, some of which are heartlessly
enough invented, satirise the legatees as well as the great whig
leader himself, and there is no denying the stinging wit of the
whole.
Next to these sham dramatic poems we may notice the dialogues,
of which Marvell’s Dialogue between two Horses (1675) is justly
celebrated. The witty humour of the piece blends well with an
only too serious political indictment of Charles and his brother,
and we may excuse the doggerel lilting metre as an echo of the
clumsy canter of his brass and marble horses. Rochester, too,
wrote a short dialogue, The Dispute, on the duke of York's
conversion to Catholicism, which contains his accustomed rankling
sting. . Curiously enough, there is a satire or two, consisting of
alternate recriminations between the duchess of Portsmouth and
Nell Gwynn (1682), conducted much to the advantage of the English
and 'protestant' mistress : but, in this species, the palm should be
assigned to the octosyllabic Dialogue between James II and his
Italian queen, which is replete with vulgar humour.
Scarcely to be distinguished from the dialogues is the ill-
defined class of squibs. Their metres are varied. Some are lyric
in character and form a link between compositions intended for
reading and ballads intended for singing: some are in octo-
syllabic lines of a Hudibrastic kind. Indeed, although they go
naturally together, it is hard to give a reason for thus grouping
them; except that invective and indignation are markedly sub-
ordinate in them to the wish to ridicule and scoff. 'Eminent
hands, as the booksellers would have said, were engaged in their
production. Marvell made a striking success of the spirited ballad
quatrains of his Poem on the Statue in Stocks-market (1672). Each
stanza contains a separate conceit on the offering of a wealthy
6
## p. 94 (#116) #############################################
94
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
Londoner to Charles II, a statue of Sobieski (of all people) being
altered for the purpose to suit Charles's features. As usual with
Marvell, the chief political grievances of the day are catalogued,
but the prevailing tone of the indictment is one of witty pleasantry.
Two of Rochester's poems also may come under this heading,
The History of Insipids (1676), which is the least revolting
among the effusions said to have led to his banishment from court.
Its cold and effective malice was, at least, dangerous enough to
cause some royal displeasure. Later, he displayed the same
mordant wit against the whigs in the epigrammatic Commons'
Petition to the King (1679). Still better as a work of art, and not
so envenomed in substance, is the lampoon On the Young States-
men (1680), otherwise, the 'Chits,' who were Charles II's chief
advisers at the close of his reign. If not by Dryden, as the
publishers claimed, the polish of this squib seems to indicate
Rochester grown ripe. Two octosyllabic pieces also demand notice,
one, On the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture (1682), for its wrath-
ful pungency, the other, a parody of King James's Declaration
(1692), by Sir Fleetwood Sheppard, for its tolerant victorious
humour. Lastly comes a group of poems in three-lined single-rimed
stanzas. The metre was peculiarly suitable for sententious argument
or a string of accusations, and some excellent talent went to their
production. Instances of their effective employment may be seen
in The Melancholy Complaint of Dr Titus Oates, and in The
Parliament dissolved at Oxford (1681), a pointed, if unmetrical,
production
Along with literary satires, attempts, in this nature, of the
dramatist Thomas Otway may be ranked. Their form is somewhat
unusual, and, in consequence, they do not easily fall into any of the
groups distinguished above. The earlier is a Pindaric ode, The
Poet's Complaint to his Muse, written when, in 1679, the duke
of York was banished, in consequence of the agitation about the
Popish plot. Very long, hyperbolical, straggling and unmelodious,
the Complaint is not an attractive piece of writing ; but the name
of its author and the furious attack on the potent ‘Libell,' who, of
course, is a whig satirist only, lend it interest. Otway's later
satiric effort, the comic scenes in Venice Preserved (1682), where
senator Antonio represents Shaftesbury, only shows to what depths
of ineptitude he could descend"; of the power to caricature he
seems devoid.
Otway, in his Complaint, mentions the kinds of poetry that
1 See chap. VII, post.
## p. 95 (#117) #############################################
Ballads
95
'Libell' was proficient in, "Painter's Advices, Letanies, Ballads.
The first of these represent the would-be literary work intended
for reading. The other two species, which had been, earlier, em-
ployed in mockery of the ruling puritans, were the property of the
ballad-monger, and were hawked about the country to be chanted
at street-corners and in taverns. Their manner is, therefore, far
more popular than that of the semi-literary satires. In scurrility,
indeed, there is little to choose between them. If anything, the
ballads have a poorer vocabulary, and hurl a few customary
epithets from Billingsgate at their opponents with a smaller
amount of detailed obscenity than opportunities of the heroic
couplet allow. But their strokes of criticism are mainly more
coarsely done and not so strongly bitten in: their humour is more
rollicking and clownish; their occasional argumentation more
rough and ready; and, in it, the ruin of trade,' due, of course, to
the wicked whigs or tories as the case might be, finds an additional
prominence.
Since they were intended for popular recitation and for an
immediate effect, it was necessary that they should be readily sung,
and this end was attained by fitting them to tunes which were
already well known and popular. This was not very difficult to
achieve. A certain number of ballad-tunes were old favourites
throughout the country; and the more successful operas or plays
of Charles II's reign frequently left behind them some air or other
which caught the general fancy and was sung everywhere. Both
these sources were put under contribution by ballad-makers, and
it was only rarely that a new tune had to be expressly composed
for a ballad, and, being composed, was admitted into the singer's
répertoire. The consequence was that a flavour of parody pervaded
almost all the political ballads of the day. It was tempting to
adopt words and phrases together with the tune; and there
resulted, for instance, a whimsical contrast between 'Hail to the
knight of the post,' directed against Titus Oates, and ‘Hail to the
myrtle shades' which began the original ballad.
Among ballad-tunes, the litany stands in the front rank. With
its three riming lines and short refrain, it was, in fact, the most
successful variation of the three-lined satiric verse.
Its name was
taken from its original refrain ‘Which nobody can deny,' which
was often superseded, especially when the attack was most bitter,
by the litany-prayers Libera nos, Domine, Quaesumus te, Domine,
or their English equivalents. A hortatory, and less implacable,
satire, which came into vogue in the later days of Charles, altered
## p. 96 (#118) #############################################
96
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
the refrain again to 'This is the Time. They were mainly, however,
sung to the one tune, although The Cavallilly Man, a cavalier
air, was occasionally used, when the lilt of the three lines and their
length were suitable. The usual type may be seen by one stanza of
the tory Loyal Subject's Litany (1680):
From the Dark-Lanthorn Plot, and the Green-Ribbon Club;
From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub;
From reforming a Prince by the model of Job,
Libera nos, Domine !
The other ballad-tunes may be conveniently divided into old and
new. Of the first class, two were much more popular than their
.
congeners. Packington's Pound was a lilting tune, fitted for a
scheme of words not unlike parts of The Ingoldsby Legends, and a
ready vehicle for broad and dashing fun. Its vogue continued
unabated till the reign of queen Anne, and some of the best ballad-
satires were written in it, the more easily as it admitted some
small variations of structure in the verse. Almost equal to
Packington's Pound in general favour was Hey, boys, up go we !
or Forty-one. This accompanied an eight-lined stanza of vigorous
movement, octosyllabic and hexasyllabic lines being alternated.
The eighth line was usually the refrain, such as 'Hey, boys, up
go we ! ' or 'The clean contrary way,' or some special one for the
occasion; but it might remain undistinguished from the rest of the
verse. Other old tunes only need a mention; there were used, for
example, Chevy Chase, Sir Eglamore, Eighty-eight, Cock Lawrel,
Ohone, ohone, Fortune, my foe, The Jolly Beggars, Ill tell thee,
Dick and Phillida flouts me, all of which date from before the
commonwealth.
Tom D'Urfey appears to have been the most popular ballad-
composer under the restoration. Tunes of his, like Sawney will
ne'er be my love again, Now the fights done, Hark, the thund ring
cannons roar and Burton Hall, were at once made part of the
ballad-monger's stock-in-trade, along with other competitors, such
as Digby's Farewell, Russell's Farewell, How unhappy is Phyllis
in love, Lay by your pleading, and a tory political tune, Now ye
Tories that glory. All these, however, are outdone in importance
by Purcell's Lilliburlero, which conferred an instant and extra-
ordinary success on Thomas lord Wharton's doggerel rimes, and
was, of course, employed for still poorer effusions afterwards. Here,
we reach the high-water mark of the ballad's effectiveness, and,
fortunately, know to whom both music and words are due? .
1 Chappell, W. , Old English Popular Music, ed. Wooldridge, 1893, vol. 11, p. 59, and
Macaulay, Hist. of England (5th ed. ), vol. II, p. 428.
## p. 97 (#119) #############################################
Ballads
97
With regard to most ballads, however, we are left in the dark
as to their authorship. Who was the reasoning tory humourist
who wrote the first two parts of A Narrative of the Popish Plot
(1679—80), or the ‘lady of quality' who continued his work? What
whig wrote the wrathful Tories Confession (1682), the disgusted
Satyr on Old Rowley (1680—1), or the scornful Lamentable Lory
(1684 ? ) (against Laurence Hyde), or the drily humorous Sir T.
Jenner's Speech to his Wife and Children (1688-9) ? Nocte
premuntur. And along with the writers of these are forgotten
their tory antagonists, the authors of the gay invective of A New
Presbyterian Ballad (1681), or the fiery Dagon's Fall (1682)
against Shaftesbury, the exulting Tories' Triumph (1685) or the
witty lampoon on bishop Burnet, The Brawny Bishop's Complaint
(c. 1698). Yet the names of the ballad-makers, even when known,
are rather disappointing. It was Charles Blount, the deist, who is
responsible for the clever and haughty Sale of Esau's Birthright
on the Buckingham election of 1679. William Wharton, a son of
Philip, fourth lord Wharton, although reputed dull, was the author
of A New Song of the Times (1683), one of the most brilliant of
whig squibs. Walter Pope, a physician and astronomer, wrote The
Catholic Ballad (1674), which displays genial pleasantry. Another
physician, Archibald Pitcairne, translated and improved the Jacobite
De Juramento illicito (1689). The 'protestant joiner,' Stephen
College, perpetrated some yapping pasquinades. And we find
some professionals. There was Thomas Jordan, the city poet, who
shows a fine lyrical feeling in The Plotting Papists' Litany (1680),
which stands quite apart in structure from the Which nobody can
deny series. His successor as city poet, Matthew Taubman, edited
a volume of tory compositions, of some of which he was presumably
author. Finally, the courtier, song-writer and dramatist, Tom
D'Urfey, composed several tory songs, all of them facile and tune-
ful, and one, The Trimmer (c. 1690), sardonically witty. D'Urfey
furnishes us with a sidelight on the audience of these ballads, when
he tells how he sang one, in 1682, with King Charles at Windsor ;
he holding one part of the paper with me. ' On one side or another,
they appealed to all the nation, and their comparative popularity
was the best gauge of public opinion.
But there were good reasons for the anonymity of this political
literature, poems, ballads and tracts. If the censorship had lapsed
or was inefficient, the law of libel gave the government ample
means for punishing the publishers and authors of anything tending
to civil division, and, naturally, while the whigs had most present
7
a
E. L. VIII
OH. III
## p. 98 (#120) #############################################
98
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
reason to fear, the tories did not forget the possibility of a turn of
the wheel. The last four years of Charles II saw a number of
prosecutions of booksellers like Nathaniel Thompson, Richard
Janeway, Benjamin Harris and others, and, although these cases do
not seem to have been very efficient deterrents, they tended to
make anonymity advisable as an obvious and easy precaution.
Meanwhile, a straggling and feebler race of prose satires existed
under the shadow of the poems and ballads. Its comparatively
scanty numbers and its weakly condition were, may be, due to the
fact that prose satire could not be disentangled without difficulty
from sober argument. The seventeenth century pamphleteer kept no
terms with his political or ecclesiastical adversaries. His reasoning
is interlarded with invective, and, if possible, with ridicule. Yet
the serious content of his tract may remain obvious, and a
traits of satire are not sufficient to change its classification. In
tracing the course of pure satire, therefore, we are left mostly to a
series of secondrate pamphlets, the authors of which, it would seem,
were distrustful of their argumentative powers and unable to
employ the more popular device of rime.
One amphibious contribution, The Rehearsal Transpros'd
(1672–3), of Andrew Marvell, deserves mention on its satiric
aspect. Though that book belongs essentially to the region of
serious political controversy, its author's design of discrediting his
opponent by ridicule and contumely is too apparent throughout for
it to be excluded from satire. As such, it possesses undeniable
merits. Marvell understood the difficult art of bantering the enemy.
He rakes up Parker's past history, sometimes with a subdued
fun—as when he says that his victim, in his puritan youth, was
wont to put more graves in his porridge than the other fasting
'Grewellers'-sometimes with a more strident invective. He can
rise to a fine indignation when he describes Parker's ingratitude to
Milton. And there is a shrewdness in his humour which brings over
the reader to his side. Yet, with all this, the wit of his book is the
elder cavilling wit of the chop-logic kind. It is a succession of
quips, which need a genius not possessed by Marvell to keep their
savour amidst a later generation. That he had high powers in
humorous comedy was shown in his parody of Charles II, His
Majesty's Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament
(1675). Its audacious mockery and satiric grasp of a situation
1. Graves' or 'greaves,' a fatty substance or juice. The word is clearly connected
both with gravy' and the composition used in graving'a ship.
## p. 99 (#121) #############################################
Satirical Narratives and Dialogues 99
>
preserve its fun from evaporating, and exhibit a dramatic faculty
we barely expect in the musing poet of The Garden.
A favourite form of prose, as of poetic, satire was the narrative.
Cabala (1663) is a fine example. Here, we are given delightful
sham minutes of meetings held by the leading nonconformists in
1662. Sardonic and malicious as it is, it includes burlesque of
great talent, as when the well-affected' minister is described as
one who indeed complieth with the public injunction of the
Church, yet professeth they are a burthen and a grief to him. ' It
has a distinct affinity with a much later composition, which, how-
ever, is by a whig and directed against the Jacobites, A true and
impartial Narrative of the Dissenters' New Plot (1690), where the
extreme high church view of English history since the reformation
is parodied in a brilliant, unscrupulous fashion. The gay, triumphant
irony and solemn banter of the piece only set off to better advantage
the serious argument which is implied and, at last, earnestly stated.
The List of goods for sale is a very slight thing compared to
elaborate productions like the above, but it gave opportunity for
skilful thrusts and lasted throughout the period. Books were the
objects most frequently described, but other items appear, as in the
Advertisement of a Sale of choice Goods, which dates from about
1670. One lot consists of 'Two rich Royal Camlet Clokes, faced
with the Protestant Religion, very little the worse for wearing,
valued at 4l. to advance half a Crown at each bidding'; which
must have amused Charles II, if not his brother.
The dialogue was a favourite form for polemic in the party
newspapers. It appears in A Pleasant Battle between tro
Lap-dogs of the Utopian Court (1681), where Nell Gwynn's dog,
following the example of his mistress, wins the day against the
duchess of Portsmouth's. So, too, there are several characters,
like that written by Oldham, but none worth special notice, save
that the railing style gives place to a more polished invective.
Another form, the parable, was in favour under William III. It
was a kind of prolonged fable, where personages of the day appear
as various birds and beasts. Thus, in the nonconformist whig
Parable of the Three Jackdaws (1696), which, perhaps, is identical
with that of The Magpies by Bradshaw, the eagle stands for
Charles II, the falcon for Monmouth, archbishop Sancroft is called
a ‘metropolitical Magpye’ and the dissenters are styled 'blackbirds
and nightingales. '
Along with these distinct genres there were printed some satires
* Cf. Dunton, J. , The Life and Errors of J. D. vol. I, p. 182.
560466 A
7-2
## p. 100 (#122) ############################################
IOO
Political and Ecclesiastical Satire
hard to classify, pretended documents, sham letters and so forth.
The Humble Address of the Atheists (1688) to James II, a wbig
concoction, is superior to most of its fellows, although it has but
scanty merit. Some way below it rank the mock whig Letter from
Amsterdam to a Friend in England (1678) and Father La Chaise's
Project for the Extirpation of Heretics (1688), in which the
opponents of the two factions decorated what they imagined were
the designs of whig or papist with products of a lurid fancy.
When we try to sum up the impression which these satires,
in verse or prose, give us, we are struck at once by the low place
which they hold as literature. Witty they often are, and with
a wit which improves. We change from flouts and jeers and
artificial quips to humorous sarcasm, which owes its effect to the
contrast of the notions expressed, and to its ruthless precision.
But even this is not a very clear advance; the quip had, perhaps,
always been a little popular form, and mere jeering continued to
be the staple satire. In fact, except Oldham, who stands apart,
these authors did not aim at a literary mark. They were the
skirmishers of a political warfare, bandying darts all the more
poisoned and deadly because it was known that most would miss
their billet. Many of them were hirelings with little interest in
the causes they espoused. Their virulence, which seems nowadays
hideous, was mainly professional : and the lewd abuse which fills
those of them which are in rime was accordingly discounted by the
public. It was not a compassionate age. The very danger of the
libeller's trade under the censorship made him the more un-
scrupulous in his choice of means. The tories, as a matter of
course, harp continually on Shaftesbury's ulcer, the result of a
carriage accident, and the silver tap which drained it was the
source of continual nicknames and scoffs : and the whigs are equal
sinners. A debauched riot reigns in most of the poetical satires,
degraded into an absolute passion for the purulent and the ugly.
The writers of them, it would appear, worshipped and loved
animalism for its own sake, not the least when they searched
through every depth of evil in order to defame their adversaries in
the most brutal way possible.
## p. 101 (#123) ############################################
CHAPTER IV
THE EARLY QUAKERS
The rise of the quaker movement in England, which began
with the public preaching of George Fox, just about the time of
the execution of Charles I, was marked by a surprising outburst
of literary activity. The new conception of religion was pro-
pagated with extraordinary zeal, and seemed likely at one time
not only to change the face of English Christianity but to mould,
after the quaker pattern, the religious life of the American
colonies. It was essentially the rediscovery, by men and women
whose whole training and environment were puritan, of the
mystical element which lies close to the heart of Christianity, but
which puritanism, with all its strength, had strangely missed. It
was a revivified consciousness of God, bringing with it the con-
viction that the essence of Christ's religion is not to be found in
submission to outward authority, whether of church or of Bible,
but in a direct experience of God in the soul, and in a life lived in
obedience to His will inwardly revealed.
The overmastering enthusiasm kindled by the new experience,
due, as Fox and his followers believed, to the immediate inspira-
tion of the Holy Spirit, impelled them to make it known by pen
as well as voice. Rude countrymen from the fells of Westmorland,
as well as scholars with a university training-even boys like
James Parnell, who died a martyr in Colchester castle at the age
of nineteen-became prolific writers as well as fervent preachers
of mystical experience and practical righteousness. Books and
pamphlets, broadsheets and public letters, followed one another in
rapid succession, setting forth the new way of life, defending it
against its adversaries, and pleading for liberty of conscience and
of worship. The organisation by which they contrived to get so
## p. 102 (#124) ############################################
IO2
The Early Quakers
large a mass of writing into circulation is not yet fully understood'.
But the fact that they found readers affords noteworthy evidence
of the ferment of men's minds in that day, and of the dominance
over their thoughts and lives of the religious interest.
Of all this vast output, there is not much that could possibly,
by its intrinsic qualities, find any permanent place in English
literature ; its chief interest now is for the curious student of
religious history. Nor can it be said to have influenced in any
appreciable degree the intellectual outlook of English-speaking
peoples, except in so far as it was one of the unnoticed factors in
the evolution of religious thought from the hard dogmatism of
puritan days to a more liberal and ethical interpretation of
Christianity. Most of the early quaker writings, having served
their temporary purpose, were read, so far as they continued to
be used at all, by the adherents of the new conception of religious
life, and by few or none beside.
That is only what would naturally be expected, when we look
at the forces that gave birth to these writings and at the con-
ditions under which they were poured forth. The purpose of these
numerous authors was not intellectual, and not (primarily at
least) theological, but experimental. They felt an inward com-
pulsion to make known to the world 'what God had done for
them,' that they might draw others into the same experience, and
into the kind of life to which it led. Moreover, the sense of
direct Divine communion and guidance, in which they lived, found
expression in terms that too often seemed to deny to the Christian
soul any place for the artistic faculty, and even for the develop-
ment of the intellectual powers. In striving to set forth what
they had discovered, they used, without transcending it, the
philosophical dualism of their day, which divided the world of
experience into water-tight compartments, the natural and the
spiritual, the human and the Divine. The terminology of the
seventeenth century, even if it served well enough to set forth
the 'religions of authority,' broke down when the quakers tried
to use it to expound their religion of the Spirit. ' The conception
of the Divine immanence, in the light of which alone they could
have found adequate expression for their experience, had been
well-nigh lost.
