SOURCE: Sheehan, David “The Ironist in Rochester's A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country.” Tennessee Studies in Literature 25 (1980): 72-83.

[In this essay, Sheehan argues that previous interpretations of Artemisia and Chloe failed to pay sufficient attention to the main character's most distinguishing characteristic—her ironic outlook on the world.]

Critics are presently unanimous in regarding A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country as perhaps Rochester's masterpiece, but there is no such unanimity about how to interpret the poem's central character, Artemisia herself. Some critics offer an essentially sympathetic assessment of her. Vivian de Sola Pinto describes Artemisia as “a witty lady” capable of making “the wise observation … that really excellent fools are produced not by nature but by civilization.”¹ Anne Righter describes her as “a kind of seventeenth-century Elizabeth Bennett. Witty and self-aware, both amused and exasperated, delighted and saddened by the follies she describes, she is the sister of Jane Austen's heroines.”² Other critics regard Artemisia's character as ambiguous. According to Dustin Griffin, “Artemisia, who at times seems to represent some sort of norm, is herself qualified and satirized by herself and the reader.”³ At the poem's conclusion, says Griffin, we are unsure of Artemisia's attitude toward men, the Fine Lady, Corinna, or herself—“Artemisia remains an ambiguous figure.”⁴ John Sitter also holds this view, with some reservation: Rochester has created “a highly relativistic framework” which prohibits complete acceptance or rejection of the speakers, although Artemisia is less discredited as an observer than are the other characters.⁵ David M. Vieth also stresses the ambiguity of the characters in the Letter: “Each seems to possess some portion of the truth; yet each is seen through or otherwise qualified by one of the others.”⁶ Moving toward a “hard” view of Artemisia's character, Professor Vieth argues that she “lacks credibility as a norm because of her logical confusion and hypocrisy … [and] her admitted helplessness in competition with women whose total conformity to prevailing fashion becomes a ‘mechanical operation of the spirit’”⁷ The most extreme “hard” view of Artemisia has been offered by Howard D. Weinbrot, who argues that in the Letter Artemisia becomes an active agent of evil in an apocalyptic or revelatory satire. Artemisia begins with “a little stock of virtue,” progressively reveals her moral deficiencies, increasingly accepts the base world she describes, until, by her promise at the poem's end to send more letters to Chloe, she has become “an agent for the propagation of infamy,” spreading rather than purging evil.⁸

None of these views pays sufficient attention to Artemisia's most distinctive characteristic, her ironic way of viewing the world. Anne Righter has accurately observed that analysis of Rochester's poems is “made difficult by the fact that so much of what happens in Rochester is a matter of tone.”⁹ This is especially true in A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country. Artemisia's ironic tone permeates the Letter, beginning with her account in the first verse paragraph of the “lofty flights of dangerous poetry.”¹⁰ Poets among the men of wit are described metaphorically as “bold adventurers” daring to explore the “stormy, pathless world,” only to be “dashed back, and wrecked on the dull shore” (4-10). But this heroic metaphor is in fact ironically undercut, for these “bold adventurers” are petty speculators in praise, “Proudly designing large returns of praise” (8) from “that little stock they had before” (11). Artemisia's irony, tinged with sarcasm, continues in her mock anxiety about “woman's tottering bark” (12) in contrast to the “stoutest ships” (13) she has already ironically ridiculed. This first verse paragraph concludes with a self-aware. ironic self-evaluation: “When I reflect on this, I straight grow wise, / And my own self thus gravely I advise” (14-15). The verse paragraph that follows reveals the irony of this evaluation. Artemisia is the very opposite of gravely wise. She is perversely defiant of conventions and, “arrant woman” as she is,

No sooner well convinced writing's a shame,
That whore is scarce a more reproachful name
Than poetess—
Like men that marry, or like maids that woo,
'Cause 'tis the very worst thing they can do,
Pleased with the contradiction and the sin,
Methinks I stand on thorns till I begin.

(25-31)

Artemisia is explicitly aware of the irony involved in her obeying Chloe's command to write poetry. Throughout the first two verse paragraphs Rochester has presented Artemisia as possessing a thoroughly ironic view of life. If we are to make sense of the crucial next section of the poem, we must fully appreciate the irony in Artemisia's character.

A fundamental question in any interpretation of this poem is whether or not we should take as ironic Artemisia's account of “Love, the most generous passion of the mind” (40-53). In “Rochester and the Defeat of the Senses,” Ronald Berman says that the passage describes a “transcendent” love which “could lead to a full experiencing of what was only potential in the human condition. … it was at least an ideal.”¹¹ Professor Weinbrot takes this passage as perfectly straightforward, as an “affirmation” of “an ideal against which the current status of love is measured, and from which Artemisia—the only character with even a hope for change—so badly strays.”¹² But, again to cite Miss Righter, so much of what happens in Rochester is a matter of tone. This passage makes sense in terms of Artemisia's character and the meaning of the poem as a whole only if it is read ironically. And there are several clues that it should be so read. In A Rhetoric of Irony, Wayne Booth discusses five categories of clues to an author's ironic intention, three of which are especially clear in this section of the Letter: (1) conflicts of fact within the work, (2) clashes of style, and (3) conflicts between beliefs expressed and those we hold and suspect the author of holding.¹³ Artemisia's description of love as “The safe director of unguided youth” seems on its face erroneous, but Rochester has not left the irony at that. As John Sitter points out, within the poem this characterization of love is “singularly undercut by the story of the young Corinna and especially in her later cynical use of the word itself as a lure for the naive Squire.”¹⁴ We are also alerted to the presence of irony by the sharp clashes of style within this passage, which begins in a matter-of-fact, conversational way:

          Y' expect at least to hear what loves have passed
In this lewd town, since you and I met last;
What change has happened of intrigues, and whether
The old ones last, and who and who's together

(32-35)

The style then shifts dramatically. Love is termed “the most generous passion,” “softest refuge,” a “safe director,” “Fraught with kind wishes,” and a “cordial drop.” The clash of styles is most dramatic when Artemisia, returning to the reductive metaphor of the poem's opening verse paragraph, describes love as the “one only blessing” on which “God might raise / In lands of atheists, subsidies of praise” (46-47). The pecuniary metaphor of God raising subsidies is an ironic reduction of love as the “one only blessing.” A still further clue to the ironic intention of this passage is the conflict between the beliefs here expressed and those we suspect the author of holding. Nowhere else in Rochester's poetry do we find such an unequivocally idealistic description of love, and in almost every poem we find it directly contradicted.¹⁵

Having ironically undermined one false notion of “Love, the most generous passion of the mind,” Artemisia proceeds directly to attack those of “Our silly sex” who are “chiefly” responsible for another corrupt conception of love. The problem with these modern lovers is that they “hate restraint, though but from infamy.”

They call whatever is not common, nice,
And deaf to nature's rule, or love's advice,
Forsake the pleasure to pursue the vice.
To an exact perfection they have wrought
The action, love; the passion is forgot.

(59-63)

Such lovers are controlled by public fashion, not private taste. Through lack of reasonable restraint, and deafness to nature's rule, they forsake pleasure in their pursuit of vice and reduce love to mechanical action without passion. Although Reba Wilcoxon does not discuss the Letter in her essay on “The Rhetoric of Sex in Rochester's Burlesque,” she shows that this attack on both the romantic ideal and on those who distort a more realistic attitude toward love into a mindless, excessive, indiscriminate sexual indulgence, is characteristic of Rochester's poetry.¹⁶ Through his character Artemisia, Rochester has offered two views of love which are inadequate, and, with the appearance of the Fine Lady, proceeds to expand this analysis by introducing and ridiculing still another false conception of love.

II

The Fine Lady is perfectly clear about her conception of love. Fools are more desirable lovers than men of wit, because the latter, “with searching wisdom, fatal to their ease” (108), insist on knowing the truth. “They little guess, who at our arts are grieved, / The perfect joy of being well deceived” (114-15). The “kind, easy fool,” on the other hand, vainly “doting on himself,” is easily kept from knowing the truth about his mistress, and is thus a more manageable, preferable lover. In his unpublished dissertation, “Passion and Reason in Restoration Love Poetry,” Richard E. Quaintance, Jr. has shown that the Fine Lady's praise of fools is part of a clearly discernible anti-rationalistic tradition in seventeenth-century love poetry, extending from poems by Raleigh, Suckling, Carew, Cowley, and many others to Rochester's Fine Lady and beyond. According to Quaintance, “the disillusioned attitude that the intellect could only obstruct courtship and destroy love never … enjoyed such widespread and conspicuous popularity” as it did during the Restoration.¹⁷ This attitude was part of the larger seventeenth-century distrust of reason, which found expression not only in libertine writing, but also in theological and philosophical debates about the limits of man's reason. As applied to the subject of love, this anti-rationalism took the form of morophilia, or praise of folly, neatly expressed as late as 1692 in a “Song” by Thomas Cheek:

Love's a Dream of mighty Treasure
          Which in Fancy we possess;
In the Folly lies the Pleasure,
          Wisdom ever makes it less.(18)

In the opening couplet of “Against Fruition I,” Suckling put the anti-rational view of love this way: “Stay here fond youth and ask no more, be wise, / Knowing too much long since lost Paradise.”¹⁹ The attitude expressed here, and in many other anti-rational love poems cited by Quaintance, is also the Fine Lady's when she recommends “The perfect joy of being well-deceived” (115).

It has been suggested that we are left “unsure” about Artemisia's attitude toward the Fine Lady, and even that Artemisia voices only “partial disapproval” of her and is in fact tragically attracted to the Fine Lady's world.²⁰ On the contrary, I think Artemisia's attitude is unambiguous, and totally disapproving. In fact, Artemisia's rejection of the Fine Lady's concept of love is itself a part of the seventeenth-century tradition of anti-rationalist love poetry. Specifically, Rochester has aligned Artemisia with Edmund Waller (whose verse the Rochester-like Dorimant is so frequently quoting in The Man of Mode)in opposing the notion of fools as best lovers. In response to Suckling's “Against Fruition [I],” Waller wrote “In Answer of Sir John Suckling's Verses,”²¹ refuting point by point the argument against fruition. Rejecting Suckling's claim that “Knowing too much long since lost Paradise,” Waller says: “And by your knowledge, we should be bereft / Of all that Paradise, which yet is left.” Like Waller, Artemisia rejects the anti-rationalist praise of ignorance, and she implicitly argues for a more realistic view of love in which restraint preserves pleasure, and passion accompanies the action of love.

Artemisia's opposition to the Fine Lady's anti-rationalism, part of a seventeenth-century literary tradition, is also unequivocal within the poem itself. From the outset Artemisia envelops the Fine Lady in her customary irony, beginning with the adjective “fine” to describe this grotesque, “antic” woman. Artemisia's negative judgment is clear in her account of the Fine Lady's relations with her husband and gallant, in her affected posturings and expressions upon arriving upstairs, and in her “forty smiles, as many antic bows” as she embraces “The dirty, chattering monster” and makes a “fine, tender speech” to the monkey. This is, as Professor Weinbrot has said, “an obscene parody of love.” The whole dramatization of the Fine Lady's arrival and behavior which Artemisia presents to Chloe and to us as readers is unmistakably negative. And Artemisia follows this dramatization with an especially destructive ironic evaluation of the Fine Lady.

There is an apparent mildness in the way Artemisia begins her evaluation of the Fine Lady:

          I took this time to think what nature meant
When this mixed thing into the world she sent,
So very wise, yet so impertinent[.]

(147-49)

By calling her a “mixed thing” Artemisia seems to be indicating at least partial approval and sympathy with the Fine Lady. But not at all. The passage proceeds to ridicule her as “an ass,” “a true fop” who has attained the “very top / And dignity of folly,” “a coxcomb,” and “An eminent fool”—“such a one was she” (151-62). The apparent concession to her wisdom and sense is in fact ironically part of Artemisia's ridicule. What wit the Fine Lady has, Artemisia says, merely makes her that much more perfect a fool: “an eminent fool must be a fool of parts” (161). Her “discerning wit” is curiously blind: she knows “Everyone's fault and merit, but her own” (165). As she began this devastating ridicule of the Fine Lady with a triplet apparently mild in judgment, Artemisia concludes with another triplet also apparently generous:

All the good qualities that ever blessed
A woman so distinguished from the rest,
Except discretion only, she possessed.

(166-68)

But in the context of the dramatization of the Fine Lady's behavior, and the ridicule of her in Artemisia's evaluation, we should surely hear the tone of irony in the phrases “good qualities,” “blessed,” and “distinguished.” And we should feel the full weight of Artemisia's judgment that “all” the Fine Lady lacked was “discretion,” that is, the ability to discern or distinguish what is right, especially as regards her own conduct. “All” she lacks is judgment. Artemisia is certainly ironic but hardly ambiguous in her satiric attack on the Fine Lady.

III

The poem's final section is also its most straightforward. In telling her story of Corinna, the Fine Lady speaks without the irony characteristic of Artemisia. The story is a double progress piece. But unlike Hogarth's moral histories, the Fine Lady's story is no pure moral exemplum, but is intended to illustrate her contention that fools make better lovers than men of wit. The harlot does not, as in Hogarth's engravings, end in a pitiable death; rather she merges into the modified rake's progress and through deceit, fraud, and eventually murder winds up with her “boody” lover's entire estate. The story of Corinna is a dark, perhaps even tragic view of the corrupt state of modern love, more dramatically detailed, if not more psychologically compelling than the “all-sin-sheltering grove” of “A Ramble in St. James's Park.” And by her rationalizing acceptance of the murderous course of “wretched Corinna,” the Fine Lady clearly associates herself with this viciously corrupt world.

Artemisia's response to the Fine Lady's story is succinct: “Thus she ran on two hours, some grains of sense / Still mixed with volleys of impertinence” (256-57). It has been suggested that in her response Artemisia has ignored “a splendid opportunity to reject the world the Fine Lady has been describing” and “instead diminishes her earlier criticisms,” and that by promising in the final verse paragraph to write more such letters, Artemisia becomes “an agent for the propagation of infamy,” and is encouraging such hellish values to take root.²² But as we have already seen, from the very introduction of the Fine Lady into her poem, Artemisia has been presenting an ironic, unremittingly negative judgment of the woman and her values. Furthermore, the story of Corinna so directly describes a vicious world in which love is perverted beyond recognition, that it requires no gratuitous moralizing by Artemisia—nor by Rochester—to convey a negative judgment. Finally, Artemisia's two-line evaluation of the Fine Lady's story is a model of ironic understatement. As she “ran on two hours,” Artemisia sarcastically observes, “some grains of sense” (which we have seen are essential in the making of a perfect fool) are “mixed with volleys of impertinence.” Artemisia used the word “impertinent” to describe the Fine Lady in her first evaluation. The word is understated, but not tepid. It means irrelevant, presumptuous, inappropriate, perhaps even offensive, absurd and silly (see OED entry). It is a powerful word here, operating in the way Anne Righter observes is typical of Rochester: “Nothing is more characteristic of Rochester than the way a single word, particularly in the final stanza of a poem, will suddenly move into focus and reveal its possession of a variety of warring meanings.”²³ “Impertinence” is a cool, perhaps cynical, certainly superior way of characterizing the Fine Lady. Yet it also has the variety of harshly condemning meanings which leave us in no doubt of Artemisia's rejection of the Fine Lady and her espousal of “The perfect joy of being well deceived” (115).

IV

Ultimately, as David Vieth and others have argued, A Letter from Artemisia apparently “affords no positive norm.” On the basis of Artemisia's attacks on the three false conceptions of love, the reader may infer the notion of a realistic kind of love which uses restraint to achieve pleasure and passion, and which is based on knowledge, not deception, on personal taste, not public fashion. But such a positive view is purely inferential; nowhere in the poem does Rochester explicitly state it. Both in its absence of a positive norm, and in the themes it treats, Rochester's Letter is similar to Swift's “The Lady's Dressing Room.” The attention given to the scatological imagery Swift uses in “The Lady's Dressing Room,” “Strephon and Chloe,” and “Cassinus and Peter” has obscured the fact that they are an extension of the seventeenth-century tradition of poems on the relation of knowledge to love in which A Letter from Artemisia holds such a prominent place. In these poems Swift (as did Rochester) ridicules the idea of love based on idealization and illusion. In each of these poems Swift describes a lover who has arrived at “the sublime and refined Point of Felicity, called, the Possession of being well deceived,”²⁴ only to be disabused of his illusions when he inadvertently discovers that his divine goddess is subject to the “Necessities of Nature.”

“The Lady's Dressing Room” is the most perplexing of these three poems. The fundamental problem is determining Swift's attitude toward the speaker of the poem. In the final sixteen lines the speaker offers an evaluation of Strephon's state:

I pity wretched Strephon blind
To all the Charms of Female Kind;
Should I the Queen of Love refuse,
Because she rose from stinking Ooze?
To him that looks behind the Scene,
Statira's but some pocky Queen.
When Celia in her Glory Shows,
If Strephon would but stop his Nose;
(Who now so impiously blasphemes
Her Ointments, Daubs, and Paints and Creams,
Her Washes, Slops, and every Clout,
With which he makes so foul a Rout;)
He soon would learn to think like me,
And bless his ravisht Sight to see
Such Order from Confusion sprung,
Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung.(25)

The “I” in these lines has been taken to be Swift, and the method and meaning of the passage to be “perfectly plain statements,” a “straightforward advocacy of accepting things as they are.”²⁶ But the speaker's complacent recommendation of illusion and delusion hardly seems like Swift. He was not one to accept “the Queen of Love” on any basis, least of all if he had to “stop his Nose” to avoid one reality in order to have his sight “ravisht” by “Such gaudy Tulips rais'd from Dung.”²⁷ As A. B. England has said, “The kind of language that is used makes it clear that the advice is being given with conscious irony.” But it is not altogether clear how we should interpret this irony. “Just where Swift stands in relation to the author's voice cannot be ascertained. … Swift makes his exposure with vigorous clarity, but he is not sure what attitude to take towards it.”²⁸

In a good recent note on this poem, Louise K. Barnett has suggested that we can, in fact, see where Swift stands by recognizing that “The satiric strategy of ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’ is an example of typically Swiftian devisioness: the subject is viewed through two personae, both of whom are unreliable although neither is entirely so.”²⁹ Both Strephon and the narrator have exaggerated responses to the body, Barnett argues: Strephon's one of disgust, the narrator's one of celebration. And where does Swift stand? “For Swift, the body must be accepted as a reality of the human condition, but its potential for bringing down the spirit must equally be recognized.”³⁰ It is worth observing that Professor Barnett cites certain passages from the text to illustrate the exaggerated responses of Strephon and the narrator, but none to support her statement of Swift's positive stance. In fact, Swift, like Rochester, offers no explicit positive position. The satiric attacks are clear, but the positive norms can only be inferred. I would suggest that we can come still closer to ascertaining just where Swift stands by considering “The Lady's Dressing Room” in light of the tradition of poems dealing with the anti-rational attitude toward love, and in particular Rochester's A Letter from Artemisia.

Strephon shares certain characteristics with the Fine Lady's “men of wit.”

Slow of belief, and fickle in desire,
Who, ere they'll be persuaded, must inquire
As if they came to spy, not to admire.
With searching wisdom, fatal to their ease,
They still find out why what may, should not please;
Nay, take themselves for injured when we dare
Make 'em think better of us than we are,
And if we hide our frailties from their sights,
Call us deceitful jilts and hypocrites.

(105-13)

Strephon is, of course, a naive and foolish variant of the “men of wit.” Unlike the more cynical and sophisticated men of wit who are “Slow of belief” and “must inquire” before “they'll be persuaded,” Strephon is initially infatuated with Celia. But like the Fine Lady's “Inquisitive” (116) men of wit, who destroy “wonder by clear knowledge” (120), Strephon “Stole in” to his lady's dressing room, “and took a strict Survey, / Of all the litter as it lay” (78). And as the men of wit bring “the glaring light” (123) of reason to bear upon their love, “No Object Strephon's Eye escapes” (47); he is “Resolv'd to go thro' thick and thin” (80). And as knowledge brings “certain woe” to the Fine Lady's men of wit, Strephon is depicted as the “wretched” victim of his own search into “‘Those Secrets of the hoary deep!’” (98). As Strephon is a naive version of the Fine Lady's men of wit, the narrator of Swift's poem shares an important opinion with the Fine Lady herself. She argues for “The perfect joy of being well-deceived”; the narrator advises Strephon to find joy in illusion, a joy perversely intensified by an awareness of how far the illusion is from reality. Swift's speaker, like Rochester's Fine Lady, is offering a praise of folly, a love based on ignorance not knowledge.

In the Letter, Artemisia ironically undermines the Fine Lady and her views, thus bringing at least that degree of clarity and certainty to the poem's meaning. Swift, however, has not included this larger ironic frame. He leaves the reader with the task of evaluating the narrator's recommendations. The exaggerations Professor Barnett has noted in the narrator's language and attitudes invite us to see him, as well as Strephon, as a satiric target. And considering the poem in light of other poems on the relation of knowledge and love helps us more clearly to see the satire directed specifically at the narrator's anti-rational praise of a love based on illusion. But Swift has not included the larger frame of irony, an Artemisia-like ironist whose perspective helps to clarify the satire. Compared to Swift's poem, Rochester's Letter is more complicated because of the greater number of interlocking frames of irony. But it is also clearer. In her role as ironist, Artemisia has clarified and intensified the satire against three false conceptions of love. In the final lines of the poem Artemisia is in perfect control of both her irony and her sense of satiric purpose:

          But now 'tis time I should some pity show
To Chloe, since I cannot choose but know
Readers must reap the dullness writers sow.
By the next post such stories I will tell
As, joined with these, shall to a volume swell,
As true as heaven, more infamous than hell.
But you are tired, and so am I.
                                                                                                              Farewell.

(258-65)

Artemisia's account of impossible ideals, mechanized love, illusions, delusions, deceptions and murder can only ironically be described as “dullness.” Such stories as Artemisia has told, joined with more of the same, would indeed “swell” a volume of satiric verse, “As true as heaven, more infamous than hell.” This description would be an apt epigraph to set before the works of Rochester.

Notes

1. Enthusiast in Wit (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. 121, 124.

2. “John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 53 (1967), 355.

3. Satires Against Mankind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 133.

4. Griffin, p. 152.

5. “Rochester's Reader and the Problem of Satiric Audience,” Papers on Language & Literature, 12 (1976), 294.

6. “Toward an Anti-Aristotelian Poetic: Rochester's Satyr Against Mankind and Artemisia to Chloe, with Notes on Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels,” Language and Style, 5 (1972), 136.

7. Vieth, pp. 137-38.

8. “The Swelling Volume: The Apocalyptic Satire of Rochester's Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 5 (1972), 19-38.

9. Righter, p. 62.

10. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. 104. Subsequent quotations are from this edition.

11. Kenyon Review, 26 (1964), 364.

12. Weinbrot, p. 23.

13. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 61-76. See also D.C. Muecke's list of the principal techniques employed in Impersonal Irony in The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969), pp. 67-68, especially items XIV, XV, and XVII.

14. Sitter, p. 297.

15. Griffin suggests that the language of this passage “seems to recall the conception of love in some of the songs, where love is a soft ‘refuge’ for innocence, a director of youth, a haven of security, essentially a mother's arms,” and cites “The Submission” as an example (p. 140). But as he himself argues in his discussion of the songs (pp. 100-14), Rochester characteristically parodies such a concept of love and explores “the pains of sex.” Even in “The Submission” the libertine's assurance of the safety of love is not unequivocal.

16. Papers on Language & Literature, 12 (1976), 273-84.

17. (Unpubl. Ph.D. diss., Yale, 1962) As Quaintance shows, the tradition of anti-rationalism in seventeenth-century love poetry, which provides the immediate context for Rochester's Letter, is itself part of a larger tradition including Ovid, Chaucer, Erasmus, and Shakespeare.

18. Quoted by Quaintance, p. 4.

19. The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), I, 37.

20. Griffin, p. 152, and Weinbrot, pp. 28-29.

21. Waller, Poems (1645; facsimile rpt. Menston, Engl.: Scolar Press, 1971), pp. 86-88.

22. Weinbrot, pp. 32-34.

23. Righter, p. 62.

24. A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 174.

25. The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), II, 530. For the correction of “Satira's” to “Statira's” in line 134 see the items by W.A. Speck, Notes & Queries, 214 (1969), 398, and by Davd M. Vieth, Notes & Queries, 220 (1975), 562-63.

26. Donald Greene, “On Swift's Scatological Poems,” Sewanee Review, 75 (1967), 679.

27. For further arguments against taking this passage as straightforward, see Thomas B. Gilmore, Jr., “The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems,” PMLA, 91 (1976), 39-40.

28. “World Without Order: Some Thoughts on the Poetry of Swift,” Essays in Criticism, 16 (1966), 36.

29. “The Mysterious Narrator: Another Look at ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’,” Concerning Poetry, 9 (1976), 29.

30. Barnett, p. 31.