SOURCE: Main, C. F. “The Right Vein of Rochester's Satyr.” In Essays in Literary History, Presented to J. Milton French, edited by Rudolf Kirk and C. F. Main, pp. 93-112. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1960.

[In the essay which follows, Main seeks to uncover the “true vein” of Rochester's A Satire Against Mankind and argues that the work is a formal classical verse satire, as it contains typical elements of such a work, including the arraignment of one vice and commendation of its opposite virtue; a two-part structure; a single theme; the use of an unpleasant, satirical person; and a retraction at the end of the poem.]

John Aubrey records an interesting contemporary opinion of the Earl of Rochester as a satirist. Andrew Marvell, he tells us, was wont to say that Rochester “was the best English Satyrist and had the right vein.”¹ If modern commentators on Rochester never fail to quote Marvell's opinion, they also never fail to leave it unexplained. Clearly Marvell had in mind some sort of contrast between Rochester's satires and other people's, including his own. It is equally clear that at least one of Rochester's satires, A Satyr against Mankind, is indeed quite unlike Marvell's political pasquils, Butler's burlesque narratives, or Cleveland's lampoons on the Puritans. When the label satire is applied to these representative English works, it refers to a mode or an attitude; when Marvell applies it to Rochester's poem, it refers to a classical genre, the formal verse satire or satura. Rochester's Satyr breaks with the native tradition. Its closest contemporary affinities are not with English satire but with French, especially with Boileau's Satire VIII. In fact, its resemblance to Boileau's Satire (1667) and its later date (ca. 1675) have led some critics, including Johnson, to regard it as a mere pendant to the earlier poem. But Rochester's and Boileau's satires are independent works, as John F. Moore has demonstrated; they have only a “broad structural similarity.”² They are structurally similar, Moore might have added, because they are both in a vein derived from the Roman satura. When Marvell calls this vein the right one, he commends as a critic and a classical scholar certain conventions of satire that he ignores as a practicing satirist. His position is like Dryden's, since the Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) describes and praises the kind of formal verse satire that Juvenal, Persius, and Boileau wrote, but that Dryden himself never attempted except in translation. Formal verse satire is so rare in English that Rochester's brilliant and early specimen in the kind deserves a closer study than it has yet received.

A formal verse satire is a quasi-dramatic poem in which a voice is heard arraigning one particular vice and commending its opposite virtue. Though sometimes the first portion of the poem contains the arraignment and the, last the commendation, a formal verse satire never splits into two distinct pieces because the virtue is always present, if not overtly then at least by implication. Thus a formal satire has two main parts in the way that a balance has them: one part will not function without the other. The satirist's “negative” denunciations always imply “positive” standards of some sort, usually a “dominant rationalistic philosophy” of the time.³ The positive-negative contrast gives the satire its framework, within which a great variety of rhetorical and dramatic devices may be used. At times this “medley” (an etymological meaning of satura) of devices may give an impression of disorder and would indeed render the satire quite formless, were it not for the bipartite structure. As a formal satirist Rochester uses several of the conventions: the unpleasant satirical persona, the adversarius who interrupts him, the partial retraction at the end of the poem. But let us first look at the structure, and first within the structure at the “negative side.”

In his Discourse Dryden insists that a perfect satire “ought only to treat of one subject; to be confined to one particular theme; or at least, to one principally. If other vices occur in the management of the chief, they should only be transiently lashed.”⁴ Rochester's practice conforms with the theory that Dryden deduced from the ancient satirists. The Satyr lashes one principal vice: pride. Instead of attacking proud individuals, the formal satirist attacks pride itself, the generic pride that mankind assumes from the mere fact of its humanity. The speaker of the satire (a discussion of the nature of this speaker must be postponed until we look at the “positive side”) begins by saying that he would rather be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,

Or any thing but that vain Animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.(5)

(lines 6-7)

The important word here is proud, not rational; at least the reader who seizes on the latter and ignores the former is bound to ignore the design of the poem. Thomas H. Fujimura, for instance, has recently attempted to define the “precise objects” of Rochester's satire by “distinguishing between the epistemological first portion and the moral satire of the second.”⁶ This view leaves the poem in two distinct pieces because it overlooks the fact that all of a satire must be moral—that is, concerned with judging human attitudes and conduct. Pride, not epistemology, is the error satirized throughout.

At climactic points the satirist arraigns pride by name. After denouncing pride founded on the mistaken notion that man has a rational faculty unique to himself (lines 1-28), the satirist paints this grim picture of man in extremis:

Huddled in dirt, the reas'ning Engine lyes,
Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.
Pride drew him in, as Cheats, their Bubbles, catch,
And made him venture, to be made a Wre[t]ch.

(lines 29-32)

Then follows (lines 33-45) an account of a typical figure, the witty man whose pride in his own wit causes his downfall. A couplet (lines 46-47) introduces another speaker in the manner of French satire (in Roman satire the adversarius interrupts more abruptly). The other speaker defends all of humanity except wits and justifies human pride by asserting that man is made in God's image (lines 48-71). To silence him, the satirist renews his attack on pride in learning (lines 72-113) and in a triplet clinches his indictment:

For all his Pride, and his Philosophy,
'Tis evident, Beasts are in their degree,
As wise at least, and better far than he.

(lines 114-116)

Having disposed of pride in wisdom, the satirist now demolishes pride in accomplishment (lines 117-173). Man, he says, owes his entire civilization—his moral code, his “Projects,” the very government that protects him from his fellows—to his innate fear. Consequently man can no more rightly be proud of what he does than of what he knows. The satire proper ends with these lines:

All this with indignation I have hurl'd
At the pretending part of the proud World,
Who swolne with selfish vanity, devise,
False freedomes, holy Cheats, and formal Lyes
Over their fellow Slaves to tyrranize.

(lines 174-178)

The poem ends with a partial retraction, a common feature in formal verse satire. This retraction (lines 179-224) was probably not prompted by the writers who answered Rochester's Satyr, as Vivian de Sola Pinto suggests;⁷ Rochester hardly needed crude rejoinders to remind him of the satirical conventions. The rejoinders to the Satyr may help us to discover how the poem was received, but not how it was composed. Despite the versions in which the retraction is labeled “Postcript,” it is an integral part of the Satyr. It consists, first, of three brief satirical characters. The character of the courtier and that of the clergyman both mention pride, and that of the foppish councilman plainly implies it. In addition, other vices besides pride are, in Dryden's words, “transiently lashed.” A succinct commendation of the “meek humble man” follows the characters and ends the poem. Having praised humility, though ever so perfunctorily, the satirist has evaded the charge of complete virulence.

Negatively considered, then, the Satyr is an attack on humanity's chief sin. The aristocratic libertine has chosen the most hoary of subjects for his satire, and the most traditional of satirical forms. Yet, or perhaps therefore, he has created an original work. Behind him lies the weight of centuries of sermonizing on pride, sermonizing that he pointedly ignores because his grounds are very different from those of Christian clergymen. The final admonition to be humble is the logical conclusion of an unorthodox view of man that runs through the poem alongside the denunciation of pride.

One must beware of taking the “positive side” of the Satyr as Rochester's personal credo, of reading the poem as though it were The Prelude. The classical satirist is not “expressing himself.” Convention requires him to assume a mask and strike a pose, to be insincere. Nothing, therefore, could be more incorrect than this typical opinion of the Satyr: “Browning might have written just such a poem in his Men and Women, dramatically; but Rochester is speaking for himself.”⁸ This comment is incorrect because it implies, among other things, that the darling of Charles's court actually wished to change places with his pet monkey. “That Rochester regarded men as knaves, fools, and animals,” another critic remarks, “there can be no doubt; it is the main argument of his satirical masterpiece, A Satyr Against Mankind.”⁹ Although it is always disastrous to re-create the historical poet from the dramatic poem, commentators on Rochester seem irresistibly tempted to do so, perhaps because the poet's life itself was so luridly theatrical. Rochester loved to appear what he was not. “In all his frolicksome Disguises,” says the author of the Memoir attributed wrongly to Saint-Evremond, “he so truly personated the Thing he would seem, that his most intimate Acquaintance could not discover the Imposture.”¹⁰ The man who in real life successfully impersonated a woman on one occasion and a mountebank on another must, surely, be permitted to invent a satirical persona. Whatever the positive doctrine of a man contained in the Satyr may be, we have no evidence that it is Rochester's private philosophy of life.

Several scholars have canvassed the sources of this doctrine. J.F. Crocker, for instance, traces the Satyr to Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sebond. “There is scarcely an idea of major or minor importance in Rochester,” he concludes, with more assurance than proof, “that is not present in Montaigne.”¹¹ Were the parallels that Crocker cites at all close, his conclusion would still be unconvincing because the Satyr and the Apologie discredit human reason for very different purposes. Montaigne and his fellow skeptics question man's ability to reason in order to stress his need to have faith in divine revelation. The main speaker of Rochester's poem is not skeptical in this sense; he makes no claim for faith. He does not even offer a choice between reason and faith, as Dryden does in Religio Laici; instead, he sets up reason and sense as opposites. Man, he says at the beginning of the poem, is inferior to the beasts because he prefers reason to “certain instinct,” and because he leaves the “light of Nature, sense, behind” (lines 10-13). The skeptics, in contrast, have no such confidence in the senses. According to Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy, they hold that “the Senses are so far from guiding the Intellect to comprehension, that they contradict one another.”¹² Rochester may have known Stanley's History, but if he did know it, he drew on its account of epicureanism, as Ronald Crane suggests,¹³ rather than on its account of skepticism. Crane also cites some convincing parallels between the theriophilic ideas in the poem and in ancient writers; yet his helpful notes are not intended to be a coherent account of the poem. Moore, who demonstrates Rochester's independence of Boileau, is equally inconclusive: “A single source for the content of the Satyr will be difficult to accept,”¹⁴ he says. Finally, and most recently, Fujimura finds in the satire a “naturalistic creed,” Hobbist in the main but with significant departures from Hobbes (p. 588). None of these investigators considers the dramatic convention of the satirical genre.

Rochester creates a speaker, who for convenience will be referred to simply as the “satirist,” of the sort that will give the maximum amount of offense to godly and conventional people in his audience, the same people whom he affronted when he had the famous portrait painted in which he is elegantly placing a laurel wreath on a monkey. The satirist commits his first offense against conventional morality in the passage denouncing pride in reason. The lines are as interesting for what they leave unsaid as for what they say:

The senses are too gross, and he'll contrive
A Sixth, to contradict the other Five;
And before certain instinct, will preferr
Reason, which Fifty times for one does err.
Reason, an Ignis fatuus, in the Mind,
Which leaving light of Nature, sense behind;
Pathless and dang'rous wandring ways it takes,
Through errors, Fenny-Boggs, and Thorny Brakes;
Whilst the misguided follower, climbs with pain,
Mountains of Whimseys, heap'd in his own Brain:
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls head-long down,
Into doubts boundless Sea, where like to drown,
Books bear him up awhile, and makes him try,
To swim with Bladders of Philosophy;
In hopes still t'oretake the'escaping light,
The Vapour dances in his dazl[ed] sight,
Till spent, it leaves him to eternal Night.
Then Old Age, and experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to death, and make him understand,
After a search so painful, and so long,
That all his Life he has been in the wrong;
Hudled in dirt, the reas'ning Engine lyes,
Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.

(lines 8-30)

In this bitter attack on intellectual pride the satirist has ignored sin and thus implied a heterodox view of man. With such extremists as Calvin he agrees that man is a worm five feet long, but he fails to give the orthodox reason for that view: man is a fallen creature, worthy only of such merit as God's grace may confer on him. The rejoinders to the Satyr call attention to the satirist's failure to mention sin. For instance, Richard Pocock, or whoever wrote An Answer to the Satyr against Mankind, agrees that mankind now has little to be proud of, but he argues that original sin deprived the race of merit:

Must the first draught of Man be vilify'd,
Scorn'd and contemn'd, 'cause Man himself hath stray'd?
Or did not Eve sufficiently transgress,
And Bastardise Posterity? unless
Man, little as he is, be made much less.(15)

The Christian view always leaves man with more than a few rags of pride. Rochester's satirist, in contrast, strips from man even the dignity of having fallen from grace. By indicting the race for stupidity rather than for sinfulness, he commits an outrage against conventional morality.

When the satirist argues that “Sense” should take priority over “Reason,” he apparently wishes to appear as a disciple of the most conspicuous contemporary bugbear, Thomas Hobbes. His term reason, as Fujimura shows, is synonymous with Hobbes's “abstruse philosophy,” the speculations of schoolmen which produce nothing but rigmaroles and verbiage; and his emphasis on sense is reminiscent of the opening chapter of Leviathan. Yet the passage in the Satyr must not be taken as an adequate summary of Hobbes's epistemology. Hobbes obviously lacked the satirist's complete confidence in sense; he relied rather on what he thought of as geometric logic, on reasoning deductively from self-evident axioms in which the terms had been meticulously defined. Sense, after all, can provide data only about the secondary qualities of matter. In The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656) Hobbes compared man and beast with results very different from the satirist's:

There be beasts that see better, others that hear better, and others that exceed mankind in other senses. Man excelleth beasts only in making rules to himself, that is to say, in remembering, and in reasoning aright upon that which he remembereth. They which do, deserve an honor above brute beasts. … So that it is not merely the nature of man, that makes him worthier than other living creatures, but the knowledge that he acquires by meditation, and by the right of use of reason in making good rules of his future actions.¹⁶

The satirist speaks, then, as a quasi Hobbist. By echoing the famous statement about sense in Leviathan and by adopting Hobbes's ridicule of inspiration and speculation, he associates himself with the alleged atheism, materialism, and licentiousness of Hobbes.

The satirist takes full advantage of the convention that obliges him to be inconsistent and unfair when he calls the inspired philosopher a “reas'ning Engine” (line 29). There is nothing “mechanical” about this philosopher's view of man; on the contrary, “engine” is an epithet more properly applied to the naturalistic satirist himself. Bishop Bramhall accused Hobbes of picturing man as a “wooden top” (V,55), or a “tennis-ball” (V,278), or “a watch which is wound up by God” (V,203)—that is, as a temporary aggregate of material in motion. The satirist, conscious of his audience, forestalls a similar accusation by making it himself. With more boldness than truth, he annoys the supernaturalists by calling them “reasoning engines.”

Having made this telling point, the satirist offers some bait to his auditory in the form of what seems to be an attack on wit. His adversarius, a “formal Band and Beard,” rises to the bait, agrees that wit should be lashed, but finds man in general worthy of more praise than censure:

What rage ferments in your degen'rate mind,
To make you rail at Reason, and Mankind?
Blest glorious Man! to whom alone kind Heav'n,
An everlasting Soul has freely giv'n;
Whom his great Maker took such care to make,
That from himself he did the Image take;
And this fair frame, in shining Reason drest,
To dignifie his Nature, above Beast.
Reason, by whose aspiring influence,
We take a flight beyond material sense,
Dive into Mysteries, then soaring pierce,
The flaming limits of the Universe.
Search Heav'n and Hell, find out what's acted there,
And give the World true grounds of hope and fear.

(lines 58-71)

In this utterance the adversarius reveals his character. He is a smug prelate, a self-styled idealist of the kind that regards all satirists as degenerates. He believes in the dignity of man, in man's essential difference from beasts, and in man's ability to pierce the infinite and thereby attain ultimate knowledge. These notions are the commonplaces of Renaissance optimism, but never in the Renaissance were they mouthed so complacently and so glibly. The adversarius is a proud man defending Pride, a mock Christian who has conveniently forgotten the Fall. Again Rochester has offended the pious by making this facile optimist their spokesman.

It is easy to demolish such a straw man, and the satirist does so by comparing him with three tenth-rate writers: Nathaniel Ingelo, Simon Patrick, and Richard Sibbes. The lines that follow the interruption show that the satirist shares Hobbes's notorious anticlerical bias, his prejudice against “Those Reverend Bedlams, Colledges and Schools” (line 83), and his distrust of “reason”:

Borne on whose Wings, each heavy Sot can pierce,
The limits of the boundless Universe.
So charming Oyntments, make an Old Witch flie,
And bear a Crippled Carcass through the Skie.

(lines 84-87)

The satirist's “heavy Sot” resembles Hobbes's dogmatic man, who takes “the habitual discourse of the tongue for ratiocination” (IV,73).

In opposition to this kind of reason, for which a better name would be “revelation,” the satirist sets up his own “right reason”:

Thus, whilst 'gainst false reas'ning I inveigh,
I own right Reason, which I wou'd obey:
That Reason that distinguishes by sense,
And gives us Rules, of good, and ill from thence:
That bounds desires, with a reforming Will,
To keep 'em more in vigour, not to kill.
Your Reason hinders, mine helps t'enjoy,
Renewing Appetites, yours wou'd destroy.
My Reason is my Friend, yours is a Cheat,
Hunger call's out, my Reason bids me eat;
Perversely yours, your Appetite does mock,
This asks for Food, that answers what's a Clock?
This plain distinction Sir your doubt secures,
'Tis not true Reason I despise but yours.
Thus I think Reason righted.

(lines 98-112)

This definition of “right reason” is perhaps the most outrageous thing in the poem, for it vastly reduces the meaning that that venerable term had carried for several generations of Christian humanists. Traditionally, right reason signifies the “immutable coalescence of truth and goodness whose source is God and whose formative cosmic role is manifested in all the workings of nature.”¹⁷ As the term is used in the Satyr, it obviously lacks all its former grandeur. Hobbes might be thought responsible for this particular deflation, since he let the wind out of so many terms, if he had not described right reason as “the natural, moral, and divine law” (II, 166), and if he had not said, “When a man reasoneth from principles that are found indubitable by experience, all deceptions of sense and equivocation of words avoided, the conclusion he maketh is said to be according to right reason” (IV, 24). The satirist and Hobbes clearly use the terms differently.

In fact, to find parallels with the Satyr one must descend from the philosophers to the dramatists. Don John, the hero of Shadwell's The Libertine (1675), agrees with the satirist that sense is the proper guide of reason:

Nature gave us our Senses, which we please:
Nor does our Reason war against our Sense.
By Natures order, Sense should guide our Reason,
Since to the mind all objects Sense conveys.
But Fools for shaddows lose substantial pleasures,
For idle tales abandon true delight,
And solid joys of day, for empty dreams at night.(18)

Similarly Deidamia, the lustful queen of Sparta in Otway's Alcibiades (1675), speaks of “sense” as man's “God.”¹⁹ Finally, in Rochester's own unproduced Valentinian the chaste Claudia says:

Each man I meet I fancy will devour me;
And sway'd by Rules not natural but affected
I hate Mankind for fear of being lov'd.

To which Marcellina, a much frailer creature, replies:

Prithee reform; what Nature prompts us to,
And Reason seconds, why should we avoid?(20)

In founding reason on sense, or rather in confounding reason with sense, the satirist associates himself with scandalous personages currently being represented on the stage. Like them he overturns the traditional hierarchy in which reason is the master rather than the servant of appetite. No clocks—no external regulators—keep the satirist from satisfying his appetites and thus achieving the ends for which he and the animals were created:

Those Creatures, are the wisest who attain,
By surest means, the ends at which they aim.

(lines 118-119)

This couplet leads from the attack on pride in philosophy to the attack on pride in accomplishment. To discredit human accomplishment, the satirist discredits human motivation. Here his “positive” doctrine of man seems entirely derived from Hobbes, whose emphasis on fear as a motive is so well known that it hardly needs rehearsing. Fujimura has recently challenged this traditional view of the Satyr; he finds that “the emphasis on fear in the poem is … a basic departure from Hobbes” (p. 585). The departure, however, is due to the conventions of satire rather than to divergent philosophies. The satirist does simplify Hobbes's complex analysis of human motivation, as Fujimura indicates, not because he disagrees with it but because satire must always be simpler than philosophy. Here Rochester has a precedent in Persius, who used only those parts of an elaborate philosophical system that were relevant to his purposes. The very act of attacking only one vice in a satire is a kind of simplification. Again, Fujimura finds “absolute” values in the Satyr, “relativistic” ones in Hobbes; and he remarks parenthetically, “I shall not try to explain why Rochester is not relativistic like Hobbes” (p. 588). The question whether Hobbes is a relativist does not concern us here. But we must expect a satirist to assume absolute standards, since satire always measures man against a fixed scale and always finds him short of the mark. In the latter part of the poem the standard is furnished by animals, who, according to Hobbes, live in “good order and government for their common benefit” and are “free from sedition and war amongst themselves.” Nor, among animals, is there any “question of precedence in their own species, nor strife about honor, or acknowledgment of one another's wisdom, as there is amongst men” (IV, 120). Animals, in sum, lack pride and fear.

Here, as earlier in the poem, the satirist argues from a naturalistic rather than a Christian bias. After contrasting man with animal, he invites his audience to

Look to the bottom, of his vast design,
Wherein Mans Wisdom, Pow'r, and Glory joyn;
The good he acts, the ill he does endure,
'Tis all for fear, to make himself secure.
Meerly for safety, after Fame we thirst,
For all Men, wou'd be Cowards if they durst.

(lines 153-158)

And again a passage in the Satyr is notable for what it omits. Thomas Lessee of Wadham College, who penned some doggerel to reprove the satirist and his mentor, has an explanation of man's fearfulness:

And first the fear y(t) trouble's him within,
Proceed's not from his nature but his sin.
Which like pale Ghosts, while they their murderers haunt,
Doe's cramp his soule, and all his courage daunt.
.....For lately 'tis evinc't all creatures are
Noe less y(n) man in the wild state of warr,
Which long agoe, y(e) weary Emperour knew,
Who hostile flyes with princely valour slew.
Is he alone? he startle's when he see's
His moving shadow, & his shadow flee's,
For who can evidence but that may bee
No meere privation, but any Enemy.
So when alone the tim'rous wretch is scar'd,
And when hee's not, hee's fearfull of his guard.
What shall he doe, or whether shall he fly,
Who durst not live, and yet he dare's not dye.
Say you, who er'e have felt those painefull stabs,
Say wretched Nero, or thou more wretched Hobbs.
Guilt is of all, and alwayes is afraid,
From fear to fear successively betray'd.
Ti's guilt alone breeds cowardice & distrust,
For all men would be valiant, if they durst.(21)

Notwithstanding the ad hominem argument, Lessee's ethic is the traditional one.

The satirist's ethic—his “positive” doctrine of man derived from a “dominant rationalistic philosophy of the time”—is a compound of Hobbesean materialism and naturalism with tinctures of epicureanism and libertinism. This doctrine provides a much more effective basis for an attack on pride than either the stoicism of the ancient satirists or the modified stoicism of the Elizabethan, for the stoic himself can always be charged with the vice that he attacks. Hobbism is not a philosophy that glorifies man, either collectively or individually. Hobbes's very exposition of human nature seemed libelous to many of his contemporaries: “If men had sprung up from the earth in a night,” complained Bramhall, “like mushrooms or excrescences, without all sense of honour, justice, conscience, or gratitude, he could not have vilified the human nature more than he doth” (IV, 288). And the same doctrine, when calmly set forth in a poem, is more damaging to man's ego than any direct assault.

That Rochester's satirist is calm and self-controlled may be perceived by comparing him with the angry personae created by the Elizabethan satirical poets. Unlike the “satyrs” of Hall and Marston, he does not lose his temper, become frenzied, wallow in filth—and thereby discredit everything he says. He is so much in control that he can afford to sneer at misanthropy itself, as he does when he glances at Diogenes, the “Whimsical Philosopher” who preferred his tub to “the spacious World” (lines 90-91). The satirist, quite at home in the world, is no outraged idealist; he is a sublunary man whose soul is sense. His tone is weary rather than angry, for he does not expect much of the human race except conduct commensurate with the race's limitations. What is unique about the Satyr, then, is that the standard it sets is very low, and that man still falls short. The poem derives its extraordinary force from the cooperation between the “positive” doctrine and the “negative” attack. In addition to being a remarkably successful work of art, the Satyr against Mankind documents the change in man's view of himself that took place in the seventeenth century. Pride, once a deadly sin, has become a gross absurdity.

I have not tried to document Rochester's own personal views from the Satyr, to incorporate the dramatic poem into the morality play that Rochester's biographers make of his life. The numerous ways in which Pope—to mention only one maligned satirist—has been misrepresented stand as a permanent warning against the practice of assuming that the “I” in every poem represents the poet. The analysis has had another purpose: to uncover the true vein of Rochester's masterpiece and to demonstrate that it heads the list of Augustan formal verse satires. With the possible exception of Donne, who escaped the customary Elizabethan confusion between satyr and satura and thus was able to imitate the spirit of ancient satire more closely than any of his contemporaries,²² Rochester wrote the first formal verse satire in English.

Notes

1. “John Wilmot: Earl of Rochester,” Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick (London, 1950), p. 321.

2. John F. Moore, “The Originality of Rochester's Satyr against Mankind”, PMLA, LVIII (1943), 401.

3. The terms in quotation marks, as well as the gist of my whole paragraph, are taken from Mary Claire Randolph, “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire,” PQ, XXI (1942), 368-384.

4. Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1926), II, 102.

5. Poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 118. All quotations from the Satyr are taken from this edition.

6. Thomas J. Fujimura, “Rochester's ‘Satyr against Mankind’: An Analysis,” SP, LV (1958), 590. Subsequent references will be given in the text.

7. Poems by John Wilmot, p. 215.

8. Oliver Elton, The English Muse (London, 1933), p. 252.

9. George Williamson, “The Restoration Petronius,” The University of California Chronicle, XXIX (1927), 275.

10. John Wilmot, Poetical Works, ed. Quilter Johns (Halifax, England, 1933), p. xxx.

11. “Rochester's Satire against Mankind,” West Virginia University Studies: III. Philological Papers, II (1937), 73.

12. Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy (London, 1660), sig. 4F2^V.

13. Ronald Crane, A Collection of English Poems, 1660-1800 (New York, 1932), p. 1198.

14. Moore, op. cit., p. 401.

15. (London, ca. 1675), p. 2. Wing P2664. I quote from the copy in the Harvard College Library.

16. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 5 vols. (London, 1841), V, 186. Subsequent references will be given in the text.

17. Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 92.

18. The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed Montague Summers (London, 1927), III, 26.

19. The Complete Works of Thomas Otway, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1926), I, 21.

20. Collected Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. John Hayward (London, 1926), pp. 191-192. With these libertine arguments cf. a “licentious” suppressed stanza of Alexander Pope's “The Universal Prayer” (Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt [London, 1954], p. 147) that Pope quite innocently penned and canceled apparently when his friends showed him its implications:

    Can Sins of Moments claim y(e) Rod
    Of Everlasting Fires?
    Can those be Sins w(th) Natures God
    W(ch) Natures selfe inspires?

21. “A Satyre, in answer to my L^d Rochesters,” British Museum MS. Sloane 1485, fol. 44. Another version of this poem, more than twice as long, is printed among the “Miscellanea” appended to Jane Barker's Poetical Recreations, 1688, sigs. 2F2-2G1^v.

22. The ablest discussion of this confusion is chapter three of Alvin Kernan's The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959).