[In the following excerpt, Chernaik argues that Waller was instrumental in the development of poetic satire.]

Waller served as an example to his neoclassical successors in two ways—as a model for imitation, especially in panegyric and satire, and as an innovator in technique. Waller's role in the development of the heroic couplet is a subject several critics have commented upon; the only book-length study of the poet, Alexander Ward Allison's Toward an Augustan Poetic: Edmund Waller's “Reform” of English Poetry, devotes itself entirely to this subject. But other equally important aspects of Waller's influence, in particular the relationship between his panegyrics and Augustan verse satire, have received much less attention.

One index to the major role Waller played in forming the Augustan sensibility is the frequency with which his poems were imitated. Waller's “sweetness,” as exemplified in his lyrics, gave rise to a large and undistinguished progeny of occasional love songs and jeux d'esprit by one or another young gentleman, dotting the pages of Tonson's Miscellanies and similar volumes. The most persistent of the epigoni was George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, who in Johnson's words “seems to have had no ambition above the imitation of Waller, of whom he has copied the faults, and very little more.”¹ A more interesting group of poems is the flourishing minor genre of complimentary epistles to ladies, in which Waller's influence and that of the Ovidian elegy coalesce. Examples among the works of Dryden include his verses to Anne Hyde, Duchess of York (1665), “To the Duchess on her Return from Scotland” (1682), and “To her Grace the Duchess of Ormond” (1700). Such poems, Dryden explains, are characterized by gallantry of tone and a Virgilian “softness and tenderness”: “I knew I addressed them to a lady, and accordingly I affected the softness of expression, and the smoothness of measure.”² The closest equivalents to these poems among Pope's works are the “Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture” (1712) and the “Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation” (1714). But the influence of Waller is strong throughout the first part of Pope's career. As love poet and stylist, he is one of the Pastorals' tutelary spirits, and The Rape of the Lock is in a very real sense a descendent of Waller's poetry of the beau monde, of gallant praise.³

We find a similar pattern of slavish copying and creative adaptation in the development of the heroic occasional poem, panegyric, and satire in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Minor poets like Katherine Philips, John Hughes, and Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, produced panegyrics that doggedly followed the earlier poet's manner; Montague's On the Death of his Most Sacred Majesty King Charles II (1685) is a virtual cento of passages from Waller. The heroic panegyrics of Dryden, though they owe fewer specific debts, build upon Waller's example. But by far the most significant influence Waller exerted was upon a genre he rarely practiced himself, satire.

Waller had a low opinion of satire as a literary genre. To him, the proper function of poetry was to praise; the poet should “[look] on all that err” with “silent pity.” Commenting, two years before Absalom and Achitophel, on attacks on the Duke of Monmouth, he writes: “Lampoons, like squibs, may make a present blaze; / But time and thunder pay respect to bays.” His dislike of satire had both aesthetic and temperamental grounds. “Satyricall writing,” he remarked in 1677, “was downe-hill, most easie and naturall. … At Billingsgate one might hear great heights of such witt. … The cursed earth naturally produces briars and thornes and weeds, but roses and fine flowers require cultivation.”⁴

The example of Waller's poetry, tuned to praise rather than detraction, was frequently invoked in opposition to the unsparing mockery of Restoration satire. Thus Sir William Temple, in a letter written in 1667, finds “the wit [Waller] and his company spent in heightening love and friendship” vastly preferable to “what is laid out so prodigally by the modern wits in the mockery of all sorts of religion and government.”⁵ Fenton begins his commentary on the poet by applying to him Archbishop Tillotson's distinction between debasing and heightening wit:

For, Wit (says he) is a keen instrument, and every one can cut and gash with it; but, to carve a beautiful image, and polish it, requires great art and dexterity. To praise any thing well is an argument of much more Wit, than to abuse: a little Wit, and a great deal of ill-nature, will furnish a man for Satire: but, the greatest instance of Wit is to commend well.⁶

Yet it was precisely in satire, the genre for which he felt such contempt and instinctive opposition, that Waller's influence was most pervasive. The heroic panegyric of Waller is the forerunner of the heroic satire of Dryden. Where earlier writers had associated satire with a “low style … according to [the] subject,” an Horatian sermo pedestris or a pseudo-Juvenalian or Persian harshness, Dryden considered satire, like panegyric, to be “undoubtedly a species” of heroic poetry. His comparison of Horace and Juvenal shows his preference for a “noble … sublime and lofty” style, in which “the majesty of the heroic” is “finely mixed with the venom of [satire].” In his view, satire, like other forms of poetry, should have its “beauties” and its “delicate touches.”⁷ Consistently, Dryden sought to raise satire above mere lampoon, which blazes forth and immediately sputters out. His best poems are characterized by the attempt to lend highly ephemeral particulars an air of permanence, to turn briars and thorns into fine flowers. In doing so he is directly indebted to the example of Waller, of whom he says (in another context), “unless he had written, none of us could write.”⁸

Panegyric and satire, the poetry of praise and the poetry of blame, are sister forms; classical rhetoricians, as we have seen, treat them as closely associated historically and governed by similar rules. The boundary between them is not absolute. A satire generally needs to present the norms whose violations it deplores; thus satire abounds in visions of the good. There are passages of direct, unironic panegyric in Absalom and Achitophel, as there are in Horace, Juvenal, Rabelais, Boileau, and Pope. A great many satires, of course, masquerade as panegyric (MacFlecknoe, A Tale of a Tub, The Praise of Folly). And in the brilliantly equivocal passages addressed to George II in Pope's Epistle to Augustus, the dividing line between panegyric and satire becomes paper-thin. Walleresque panegyric, like the verse satire of the Augustan age, depends on a style which is witty and flexible, capable of smoothness or bite, written in couplets in which every word counts. Both work by setting up an ideal (often associated with a classical-Christian golden age, mythical or semi-historical) against which the actual is measured; both depend heavily upon a network of allusions, explicit or implicit comparisons; both frequently present an ideal of order and sanity seriously threatened from without.

The potentialities of satire are greater than those of panegyric, the difficulties less disabling. Perhaps heroic panegyric can never entirely get around the problem of truth, the limitations imposed by the unchanging necessities of praise, support of the status quo, inflation and simplification of the dubious and problematical. Irony is a great advantage: it enables a poet to eat his cake and have it too, to echo and imitate earlier, perhaps less legitimate heroicizing while making use of it for his own purpose. If a writer is able to use comic inflation along with serious, if he is able to encompass in his poem not only heroic virtue but worldly vanity, then the way is open for great poetry.

Waller's own attempts at writing heroic satire were not entirely successful. “The Battle of the Summer Islands” (1638), an elaborate narrative poem set in far-off Bermuda and dealing with a battle between the islanders and a whale, appears to waver between a serious and a comic treatment of its subject. Dr. Johnson judges the poem harshly:

Of “The Battle of the Summer Islands” it seems not easy to say whether it is intended to raise terror or merriment: the beginning is too splendid for jest, and the conclusion too light for seriousness. The versification is studied, the scenes are diligently displayed, and the images artfully amplified; but as it ends neither in joy nor in sorrow, it will scarcely be read a second time.

But Johnson misreads the tone, which attempts to combine wonder with playful mockery. The magic land the poem describes, with its eternal spring and extraordinary fruitfulness, is presented as a place not quite believable, as the setting of a fairy tale whose characters are miniatures of men. The two elements, the marvellous and the comic, are both present throughout the work, though in different proportions. Thus the poet is able to modulate from the pastoral idyll of the first canto to the mock-heroic comedy of the rest.⁹

As praise of an ideal, the first canto resembles Waller's panegyrics. In this first section of the poem, the Summer Islands are the Fortunate Isles, where all things flourish in their original, unfallen perfection. Waller's pet theme of the “happy island,” protected from the evils of the world, finds its fullest expression here:

Bermudas, walled with rocks, who does not know?
That happy island where huge lemons grow,
And orange trees, which golden fruit do bear,
The Hesperian garden boasts of none so fair.

(I.5-8)

In this earthly paradise the trees bear gold, while pearls, coral, and ambergris deck the beaches. Even “the naked rocks” are “not unfruitful,” and at certain times of the year abound “with luscious food,” the eggs of birds. The very weeds are valuable: while tobacco, “the worst of things,” is shipped to England in payment of rent, the islanders dine off the far more precious fruits their land freely provides them (I.25-35).

In cold England, the fallen world, spring is over almost as soon as it appears, but Bermuda is a land of eternal spring, where all potentials are fulfilled:

For the kind spring, which but salutes us here,
Inhabits there, and courts them all the year.
Ripe fruits and blossoms on the same trees live;
At once they promise what at once they give.

(I.40-43)

Here as in his panegyrics, Waller draws on classical and Christian versions of paradise. Both the myth of the golden age and the biblical Garden of Eden are visions of past glory, now lost.¹⁰ The magic island serves as a standard for judging the diminished world men inhabit—the “cold orchards” which produce a few small fruits in several years' time, the “unripe and ill-constrained notes” poets are forced to sing in the sunless north:

Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncursed,
To show how all things were created first.

(I.58-59)

Waller has ample precedent, literary and other, for his characterization of the islands of the Western Hemisphere as an unfallen Eden. Captain John Smith, in his Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, provides not only the terms of Waller's description, but something of the same idealization:

There seems to be a continuall Spring … and though the trees shed their leaves, yet they are alwaies full of greene. … Without plowing or much labour, they have two Harvests every yeere … and little slips of Fig-trees and Vines doe usually beare fruit within the yeere, and sometimes in lesse.¹¹

The accounts of voyagers regularly described the new world in terms of the received myths of perfection: a land of gentle and everlasting spring, in which the earth brings forth abundance without planting and the inhabitants “live after the maner of the golden age.”¹² The paradise can be a secular one, or it can carry religious overtones, as in Andrew Marvell's “Bermudas.” Marvell's poem provides a particularly interesting contrast with “The Battle of the Summer Islands,” on which it draws as a direct source. To Marvell, every detail bears religious significance. At all times we are aware that the gifts of nature are God's, and the poem is a hymn of thanksgiving. This element is entirely absent from Waller, even in the passages where the poets are most close.¹³ Waller's paradise is a dream of innocent epicurean retreat from the cares of the world—the poet as inspired beachcomber, with nothing to do but amuse himself with thoughts of love and poetry:

Oh! How I long my careless limbs to lay
Under the plantain's shade, and all the day
With amorous aires my fancy entertain,
Invoke the Muses, and improve my vein!

(I.62-65)

His poem is a fanciful exercise in impossibilities, a dream paradise attainable only by the imagination, fated not to last.

From the beginning of the poem, we have been aware of the possibility of loss, and several details serve as foreshadowing. Wild figs which grow on the island, we are told, are the equal of those which Cato displayed to the Roman Senate in urging the destruction of Carthage, “With the rare fruit inviting them to spoil / Carthage, the mistress of so rich a soil” (I.23-24). The destructive human emotions which have been kept out of the “happy island … walled with rocks” are massed outside, waiting to come in—or are present in potential within the islanders themselves. In the second canto, two whales are trapped by the tide among the rocks of the island. The enormous creatures are at first a source of terror, but then when the islanders see that they are relatively helpless, they begin to look more and more like an easy prey, and the young men of the island march forth to do battle. The child of nature we have seen in the first canto has turned into the more equivocal hero of mockepic, the awkward knight, the representative of human folly:

[They] Dispose already of the untaken spoil,
And as the purchase of their future toil,
These share the bones, and they divide the oil.

(II.35-37)

The intentions of cantos two and three are plainly mock-heroic. In presenting the encounter between men and whales, the poet consistently makes use of the language and conventions of epic poetry: epithets, similes, noble-sounding sententiae, an elevated Latinate style, invocations of the gods, comparisons with earlier representatives of the epic tradition. The description of the younger whale's return after his escape, for example, consists of one amplifying comparison after another:

Roaring she tears the air with such a noise,
As well resembled the conspiring voice
Of routed armies, when the field is won,
To reach the ears of her escaped son.
He, though a league removed from the foe,
Hastes to her aid; the pious Trojan so,
Neglecting for Creusa's life his own,
Repeats the dangers of the burning town.

(III.57-64)

Though the whales provide a properly heroic adversary, the knights whose task it is to slay the dragon do not measure up. Turnus usurps the role of Aeneas, and “The men, amazed, blush to see the seed / Of monsters human piety exceed” (III.65-66).

The distinguishing characteristic of the mock-heroic approach is a conscious disproportion between material and treatment, between fact and image: the heroic emotions and attitudes evoked have no appropriate object to fasten onto, and the contrast between magniloquent language and unheroic actuality serves to refute the pretensions under attack. Where the panegyrist seeks to gloss over what is potentially embarrassing, the satirist makes these very things stand out glaringly, showing the gap between the ideal and the actual. The youths of the island make every effort to “show / What love, or honour, could invite them to” (II.44-45), but their pretentions of chivalric glory are shown to be hollow. They suffer the simplest and most direct indignity in the lexicon of knighthood, falling off a horse:

And down the men fall drenched in the moat;
With every fierce encounter they are forced
To quit their boats, and fare like men unhorsed.

(III.14-16)

Again and again, the great strength and courage of the whales are contrasted with the pettiness and puniness of the men. Even when the mother whale lies helpless before their assaults, the men are outclassed: “The shining steel her tender sides receive, / And there, like bees, they all their weapons leave” (III.23-24). One is reminded of Gulliver in Lilliput.

What destroys the tranquillity of the island, we come to see, is not the invasion of the whales but the vanity of man, dreaming of self-aggrandizement and instant glory. The whales, free of sin and excessive concern with self, are at one with the unfallen world of uncurbed magnanimity we have seen in the first canto; the men are not. All the human feeling in this part of the poem, as well as all the genuine courage, rests with the whales. The battle is grotesque, but the whales are not an object of ridicule; indeed, toward the end of the poem, pathos rather than humor is the prevalent mode. In describing the attack on the defenseless whale, Waller uses a straightforward, unironic rhetoric of amplification to accentuate the pity of the situation—the whale's physical greatness, the awesome power of nature, and the hubris of man, who is constantly attempting to interfere with the natural order, imposing his own rule:

And now they change the color of the lake;
Blood flows in rivers from her wounded side,
As if they would prevent the tardy tide
She swims in blood, and blood does spouting throw
To heaven, that heaven men's cruelties might know.

(III.46-52)

“The Battle of the Summer Islands,” then, attempts to be at one time serious and comic; idyllic, heroic, and mockheroic; ironic and pathetic. Waller shows the way for Dryden and Pope in treating his comic material seriously, in giving his mock-heroics a dignity of utterance, in using a heroic rather than a burlesque style. Yet his poem is not really like those of the Augustan satirists—it is far gentler and far more softhearted. Perhaps, in spite of its mock-heroics, it is closer to the genre of pastoral than to satire; criticism is subordinate here to the presentation of an ideal.¹⁴ One is reminded, particularly in the first canto, of the juxtaposition of the idyllic and comic in many pastorals, the double perspective on a world much less sophisticated, in both a good and a bad sense, than our own. “The Battle of the Summer Islands” is in many ways a Renaissance poem rather than a neoclassical one, closer to Spenser than to Pope. The flexibility of tone and the choice of subject matter, along with the machinery of cantos and arguments, indicate Waller's debt to the Renaissance epic romance; Tasso, Ariosto, and Spenser (especially those parts of Books III, IV and VI of the Faerie Queene that are closest to the Italianate tradition) are his models as much as the classical epic.¹⁵

Waller's one other mock-heroic poem, “The Triple Combat” (c. 1675), similarly tempers its satire with gentleness. The poem is a graceful account of the battle for supremacy between the recently arrived Duchess of Mazarin, the Duchess of Portsmouth, and English Chloris (identified by various commentators as Nell Gwyn and the Duchess of Cleveland). The tone is one of dignified amusement; its decorum is unruffled throughout.

Yet like the Three on Ida's top, they all
Pretend alike, contesting for the ball;
Which to determine, Love himself declined,
Lest the neglected should become less kind.
Such killing looks! So thick the arrows fly!
That 'tis unsafe to be a stander-by.

(33-38)

We can see in lines like this what Pope learned from Waller. A good deal more is at stake in The Rape of the Lock, of course, and Waller is by no means the later poet's equal in his mastery of the local effects of language or in satiric pointedness. Still, “The Triple Combat” points the way for Pope with its witty allusions to the epic tradition and with its delicate control over a complex tone. The hints of disapproval at the sexual conduct of the royal mistresses and at the world of palace intrigue they inhabit are balanced by the suave, courtly tone and the constant undercurrent of praise. What holds the various elements together is irony: the critical sharpness shows through the gallantry, especially in the witty second couplet. The same effect is at work elsewhere in the poem. To say that “Venus had been an equal friend to” each contestant (25) is both praise and dispraise; the irony allows author and reader to share the joke, creating an air of civilized detachment from the spectacle of human pretension. “The Triple Combat” is far removed from the bluntness of most contemporary treatments of the subject:

Was ever prince's soul so meanly poor,
To be enslav'd to every little whore?
Witness the royal line sprung from the belly
Of thine anointed Princess, Madam Nelly,
Whose first employment was with open throat
To cry fresh herrings e'en at ten a groat.(16)

The Augustan satirists, in company with Waller, give their allegiance to “fine raillery,” artistic indirection, rather than direct abuse. “How easy it is,” Dryden writes, “to call rogue and villain … But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of those opprobrious terms! … A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband.”¹⁷

Dryden himself was uncertain of his ability to live up to his ideal of heroic satire, and it is understandable that Waller, in his few attempts in the genre, should have failed to achieve the ideal. In isolated passages both “The Battle of the Summer Islands” and “The Triple Combat” manage the difficult task of making “a malefactor die sweetly,” succeed in holding their discordant elements in a delicate ironic balance. But the balance is a difficult one to maintain, and the success of both poems is limited and intermittent. Waller was not temperamentally inclined toward satire, and the poems we have been discussing have more elegance than bite. As Dryden says of Horace, “his urbanity, that is, his good manners, are to be commended, but his wit is faint; and his salt, if I may dare to say so, almost insipid.”¹⁸ If, as Northrop Frye has suggested, satire is characterized by a “double focus of morality and fantasy,” with two poles of militant, purposeful attack and pure, amoral inventiveness, the free play of the imagination, Waller is more at home with the second.¹⁹ Moreover, he reverses the ordinary proportions of satire in giving greater emphasis to the ideal than to its violation. Indeed, Waller sometimes finds the ideal where no one else would. In its closing lines, “The Triple Combat” makes a surprising turnabout. The sway of the King's mistresses, which Waller has been mildly poking fun at, and which other satirists of the time fiercely attack, suddenly and charmingly becomes an image of perfection, of the world art creates for itself.

                                                            Our golden age,
Where Love gives law, Beauty the sceptre sways,
And uncompelled, the happy world obeys.

(44-46)

Even in satire, the characteristic attitudes of Waller the panegyrist are not far away.

The years between 1660 and 1700 witnessed an extraordinary profusion of satire. Much of it, like much of the panegyric the period produced, is now unreadable—squibs which barely blazed up for a moment. Yet the best of the Restoration satirists, like Waller, sought a hedge against oblivion, sought in one way or another to give their poems more staying power without sacrificing their pointed topicality. In their satires, Dryden, Rochester, Marvell, Butler, and Oldham were all in varying degrees concerned with form, with tradition, and with the creation of a multiple perspective. Dryden, the major figure among these satirists, owes more to Waller in his satiric method than the others do, but all dealt with a similar set of problems.

Satire, like panegyric, must be effective both as persuasion and as literature; it must convince in two different ways. The author writes as a partisan, yet in a sense he must disguise his partisanship; satire and panegyric are often most effective when they create the illusion of objectivity. Satirists are the self-acknowledged legislators of the world. Ordinarily, satire is aimed at the educable, “the more Moderate sort … not the Violent,” those able to take the satirist's lesson to heart. Even where there is little or no hope for reforming the fools and knaves themselves, they can be branded “a public nuisance,” arraigned for the benefit of others. “'Tis an action of virtue to make examples of vicious men. They may and ought to be upbraided with their crimes and follies; both for their own amendment, if they are not yet incorrigible, and for the terror of others, to hinder them from those enormities which they see are so severely punished in the persons of others.”²⁰ In all these cases, it is the satirist's responsibility to show that what he considers a vice is one, and that correction is possible or desirable—in other words, to validate his standards. His position is anything but detached, yet through various devices he gives his partisan arguments the objectivity of wit, point, precision, and aesthetic distance.

Heroic satire, as developed by Dryden, is fundamentally an approach to the problem of validation, an attempt to get around the inevitable subjectivity and particularity of the genre. The heroic path was not the only one for neoclassical satire, of course. But much of the experimentation in the techniques of satire which characterized the Restoration and early eighteenth century led similarly in the direction of art, detachment, and control. The awareness of tradition implicit in the ideal of creative imitation, the manipulation of points of view and personae, the careful maintenance and deliberate, pointed violation of stylistic decorum, the development of a network of allusions which adumbrate standards for judgment—all these things reflect the conviction that satire can be a fine art.

Waller served as a model for heroic satire in several ways—in his panegyrics, in his own heroic satires, and, by a curious irony, in a number of poems in which he was the victim of satire. The most consistent and successful application of epic devices to satire before Dryden is found in parodies of heroic panegyrics. The parodist has certain built-in advantages: problems of style, tone, and the relevance of details to the whole are to some extent solved for him. The form and direction of his work, as well as the point of view, are to a large degree determined by its relationship to an original which he can in part imitate and in part attack. In the series of anti-heroic “painter” poems which followed in the wake of Waller's Instructions to a Painter (1666), the assumptions and style of Walleresque panegyric are turned against their originator. At times they rely on direct parody, at times, less closely tied to a specific original, on a free ironic imitation, using the methods of panegyric to refute illegitimate pretensions of heroism. Though uneven in quality and often uncertain in approach, the best of the “painter” poems succeed in their best moments in combining in a single form the advantages of epic poetry and satire.

Waller's Instructions to a Painter, a highly elaborate “historical poem” praising the exploits of the Duke of York, is particularly vulnerable to attack because its insistence on epic grandeur and romantic gallantry is so relentlessly single-minded. The poem's characteristic figure is hyperbole; at all times it seeks to magnify, making the Duke of York a superior Achilles and the battle of Lowestoft (in reality rather inconclusive) a second battle of Actium:

Draw the whole world, expecting who should reign,
After this combat, o'er the conquered main
Make the sea shine with gallantry, and all
The English youth flock to their Admiral
With his extraction, and his glorious mind,
Make the proud sails swell more than with the wind.

(5-6, 9-10, 19-20)

Throughout the poem, the raw and often unlovely materials of fact are changed before our eyes into the stuff of romance, and the poet never loses his composure. One passage describes the fleet's return to port after having run out of provisions. Prosaic fact may tell us that the sailors were unpaid and that the visit of the court ladies to the fleet was mere self-indulgence and show.²¹ To the poet, none of this matters:

Spreading our sails, to Harwich we resort,
And meet the beauties of the British court.
The illustrious Duchess, and her glorious train,
(Like Thetis with her nymphs) adorn the main.
The gazing sea-gods, since the Paphian Queen,
Sprung from among them, no such sight had seen
The soldier here his wasted store supplies,
And takes new valour from the ladies' eyes.

(79-90)

Three gentleman volunteers are killed at the Duke of York's side. In the heroic never-never-land of the poem, nothing in life could become them like the leaving it:

Happy! to whom this glorious death arrives,
More to be valued than a thousand lives!
On such a theatre as this to die,
For such a cause, and such a witness by!
Who would not thus a sacrifice be made,
To have his blood on such an altar laid?

(149-54)

Yet truth cannot be kept from breaking in. Three hundred forty lines of unabated gallantry is quite a lot; the poet's wit and grace have the difficult job of controlling the intrinsic absurdity of much of his material. The result, in lines like the “glorious death” passage, is an elegant monotony, neatly turned out, predictable and thin. The reader is surfeited with sweets—as, clearly, were several of Waller's contemporaries.

Waller's poem was greeted shortly after publication by the “Second Advice to a Painter,” a biting satire on the Duke of York and the court party. The relationship between this poem and Waller's is simple and direct: the “Second Advice” is virtually a line-by-line refutation of Instructions to a Painter, parodying Waller's characteristic rhetoric and looking at the events Waller had described, the conventions and attitudes that inform his poetry, with the cold eye of satire: “First, let our navy scour through silver froth, / The ocean's burden and the kingdom's both.”²² The pseudo-Virgilian periphrases, characteristic of Waller's heroic style, become a vehicle for satire: the navy is a literal burden (on the taxpayer), not simply a metaphorical one. In describing the Duchess of York's descent on Harwich, the author of the “Second Advice” uses similes to deflate and not to amplify. When he compares navies to “fopperies,” “a small seamasque” (65-66) set up for purposes of courtship, and likens the Duchess and her train to the “land crabs” which “at Nature's kindly call / Down to engender at the sea do crawl” (57-58), his choice of diction and imagery is as consistent as Waller's and as well suited to his purpose. The satirist uses the devices of balance and antithesis as he uses heroic conventions, reductively. Here is his version of the “glorious death” of the royal favorite Falmouth:

Such was his rise, such was his fall, unprais'd:
A chance shot sooner took him than chance rais'd.
His shatter'd head the fearless Duke distains,
And gave the last-first proof that he had brains.

(185-88)

Throughout, he takes the standard topoi of epic panegyric and turns them to satiric effect: the sound and fury of battle description, the interested gods, the inevitable comparison of the King to the sun. Like the panegyrist, he can create an impressive passage by developing an image at length, giving a convention new and surprising life. Thus, toward the end of the poem, he addresses these lines to the King:

What boots it that thy light does gild our days
And we lie basking in thy milder rays,
While swarms of insects, from thy warmth begun,
Our land devour and intercept our sun?

(347-50)

The effectiveness of the lines comes from their combination of the expected and the unexpected: the familiar associations of the sun as royalist emblem, reinforced in the first two lines, make the swarming insects an even stronger violation of the decorum of a well-ordered state.

The “Second Advice” and the “Third Advice to a Painter,” probably by the same author, are essentially attempts to give the lie to the heroic interpretation of the events and personages of the Second Dutch War. “Victory,” the author of the “Third Advice” says, “does always hate a rant”; the satirist's duty is to expose the empty boasts of the eulogists, to reveal things as they really are:

Death picks the valiant out, the cow'rds survive.
What the brave merit th'impudent do vaunt,
And none's rewarded but the sycophant.(23)

Marvell's “Last Instructions to a Painter” takes a somewhat different approach. “Last Instructions,” unlike its predecessors, does not parody Waller directly, and it relies less on the purely reductive use of heroic devices. Instead, it uses the conventions and imagery of Walleresque panegyric to create a genuine heroic satire—to impale its figures on a pin or blow them up to grotesque, absurd proportions in a style that can be savage or dignified at will. …

Notes

1. Johnson, Lives of the Poets, 2, 294. Lansdowne's poems may be found in Anderson, Poets of Great Britain, 7.

2. Ker Essays of Dryden, 1, 19.

3. Waller was one of Pope's “great favourites” in his youth, and among the first poems he wrote were seven imitations of Waller; see Butt, Poems of Alexander Pope, pp. 3-5, 12; and Spence, Anecdotes, pp. 6, 18-19. The notes to Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams (London and New Haven, 1961), point out a number of echoes of Waller in the Pastorals and other early poems of Pope. Gay, who wrote several poems in this manner, pays explicit tribute to Waller in The Fan, a pallid satire in imitation of both Waller and Pope.

4. “Upon the Earl of Roscommon's Translation of Horace,” 30; “On the Duke of Monmouth's Expedition into Scotland,” 37-38; Brief Lives, p. 310.

5. Letters Written by Sir William Temple, Bart, and other Ministers of State (2 vols. London, 1700), 1, 116-17. Cf. the memorial poem by Sir John Cotton, in Poems to the Memory of Edmond Waller: “Thou do'st not write like those, who brand the Times, / And themselves most, with sharp Satyrick Rhimes. / Nor does thy Muse, with smutty Verses, tear / The modest Virgin's chast and Tender Ear.”

6. Fenton, p. iii. The original may be found in Sermon II, “The folly of scoffing at religion,” The Works of the Most Reverend John Tillotson, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (12 vols. London, 1757), 1, 91.

7. Ker, Essays of Dryden, 2, 84-86, 108. The relationship between Dryden's theories and the style of his own satires has been discussed by a number of critics; see esp. Reuben A. Brower, “An Allusion to Europe: Dryden and Tradition,” ELH, 19 (1952), 38-48, reprinted as the introductory chapter of his Alexander Pope: the Poetry of Allusion (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 1-14; Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 43-76; and Nevo, The Dial of Virtue, pp. 215-17, 240-65. Mrs. Nevo's book is the best treatment in print of the relationship between panegyric and satire in the seventeenth century; my own study, completed in its original form before publication of Mrs. Nevo's book, may serve as independent support of some of her conclusions.

8. Ker, Essays of Dryden, 1, 284.

9. Lives of the Poets, 1, 289. The only recent critic to devote any attention to the poem is Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphoses of a Classical Ideal 1600-1700 (Oslo, 1954), pp. 150-52. Her remarks, though interesting, are limited to the idyllic first canto, ignoring the rest of the poem. She relates the poem, with its “escapist tendency,” to the genre of poems contrasting rural retirement with the bustle of the city, and finds that its emphasis on “the pleasant aspects of … retirement” and presentation of an Earthly Paradise exemplify a “soft” Epicurean primitivism.

10. The word nondum (not yet) and other negatives echo through Ovid's account of the golden age (Metamorphoses, I.89-112): forts, swords, hoes, ploughs were not yet necessary. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Ovid makes the alternation of seasons consequent on man's fall from perfection. The double strain of “yearning and nonpossession, desire and inaccessibility” is characteristic of nearly all versions of paradise and Elysium; see Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic, p. 84.

11. Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, ed. Edward Arber and A. G. Bradley (2 vols. Edinburgh, 1910), 2, 626-27; cf. Battle of the Summer Islands, I.40-55. The Generall Historie was published in 1624 and reached a fourth edition in 1632. The opening section of Smith's account of Bermuda provides Waller with most of his details about the island's natural riches—pearls, ambergris, lemons, oranges, palmettos, figs, plantains, melons, pineapple, papaw, cedars, and tobacco. One unusual detail for which Smith serves as source is the gathering of eggs off the rocks (I.25-28). A second work by Smith, The True Travels, Adventures, and Observations of Captaine John Smith, in Europe, Asia, Affrica, and America (1630), includes in its chapter on Bermuda a brief description of a whale trapped in a bay, which may very well have served as Waller's source for the second and third cantos (the events, though in this case not the tone and treatment); see Travels and Works, 2, 889.

12. Arthur Barlowe's account of the discovery of Virginia (1584), in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (6 vols. London, 1907), 6, 128. More than a dozen passages in travelers' accounts treating the Americas as a paradise are cited in Robert Rawston Cawley, The Voyagers and Elizabethan Drama (Boston and London, 1938), pp. 290-91.

13. “With Cedars, chosen by his hand, / From Lebanon, he stores the Land. / And makes the hollow Seas, that roar, / Proclaime the Ambergris on shoar. / He cast (of which we rather boast) / The Gospels Pearl upon our Coast. / And in these Rocks for us did frame / A Temple, where to sound his Name) (“Bermudas,” 25-32, in Margoliouth, Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell). The equivalent passage in Waller is largely secular, and any religious implications are as much pagan as Christian: “Where shining pearl, coral, and many a pound, / On the rich shore, of ambergris is found. / The lofty cedar, which to heaven aspires, / The prince of trees! is fuel for their fires” (I.9-12). Several parallels between the two poems are pointed out in Margoliouth's edition, 1, 220.

14. Frank Kermode's introduction to English Pastoral Poetry (London, George G. Harrap, 1952), esp. pp. 14-15, includes suggestive remarks on the relationship between the two genres of pastoral and satire.

15. Ariosto provides precedent for “The Battle of the Summer Islands” in his mixture of heroic romance and comic irony, but Waller nevertheless preferred the dignity of Spenser and Tasso to Ariosto's lightheartedness. Edward Fairfax's translation of Gerusalemme Liberata was Waller's favorite poem. Lines imitated from Fairfax's Tasso, The Faerie Queene, and the Aeneid are sprinkled through his works, and several allusions to the events of the three poems show his detailed familiarity with them.

16. “Satire” (1677), attributed to John Lacy, 7-8, 23-26, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1, 426.

17. Ker, Essays of Dryden, 2, 92-93.

18. Ibid., p. 84.

19. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 224-25.

20. Dryden, Preface to Absalom and Achitophel, in Kinsley, Poems of Dryden, 1, 215; “Discourse concerning Satire,” in Ker, Essays of Dryden, 2, 80.

21. See Arthur W. Tedder, The Navy of the Restoration (Cambridge, Eng., 1916), pp. 112—17; and Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics Under the Stuarts, pp. 199-200.

22. “Second Advice to a Painter,” 113-14, in Lord, Poems on Affairs of State, 1 In lines 65 and 185-86, below, I have emended the POAS text in favor of readings from the 1689 edition (Third Collection of the Newest and Most Ingenious Poems, Satyrs, Songs, & c. against Popery and Tyranny, Relating to the Times). There are two good discussions of the “Second Advice” and “Third Advice” as anti-heroic satire: Lord's introduction, POAS, 1, xliv-xlvii; and Nevo, The Dial of Virtue, pp. 164-72.

23. “Second Advice,” 220-22; “Third Advice,” 71, in Lord, POAS, 1. George deF. Lord, “Two New Poems by Marvell?” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 62 (1958), 551-70, has argued that the “Second” and “Third Advice,” because of similarities to the “Last Instructions” in style, emphasis, and political outlook, should be attributed to Marvell. But Ephim G. Fogel, “Salmons in Both, or Some Caveats for Canonical Scholars,” BNYPL, 63 (1959), 223-36, 292-308, has argued against the attribution, and the objections he raises are cogent enough to put the issue once more in doubt.