[In the following essay, Erskine-Hill considers whether Rochester should be a viewed as an explorer/adventurer—one who lacks a stable pattern of any but the most elementary values—or as an “Augustan,” like John Dryden and Alexander Pope, who is confident in a Christian-classical world-view, and concludes he is most clearly the former.]

I

Rochester, the man and his work, is a major landmark in the terrain of Restoration poetry. That he should come to be recognized as such, in the last fifty years, is due largely to the enthusiasm of the writings and teaching of Vivian de Sola Pinto.¹ But if Rochester's place is assured, the nature of his achievement is in dispute. Pinto, while recognizing Augustan qualities in his work, has also drawn analogies between Rochester and such un-Augustan authors as Marlowe and Blake. David M. Vieth, in an important recent study, considers him fully an Augustan, and finds a strong affinity between his satire and Pope's in respect both of literary techniques and underlying values.² The question is whether Rochester's poetry is chiefly that of an explorer through the ‘Perplexity of endless Thought’, or of a man confident in a stable and ultimately satisfying world-view, by which he can judge the follies of his fellow men.³

Without doubt there are interesting and important affinities between Rochester and Pope in respect of qualities which may reasonably be called Augustan. ‘An Allusion to Horace’ is the first Augustan imitation in English and is comparable to Pope's Epistle to Augustus.⁴ ‘Tunbridge-Wells’ has resemblances to Pope's Fourth Satire of Dr Donne, owing to the common descent from the Ninth Satire of Horace's First Book. Artemisa to Cloe, in its intimate and delicate modulation of the familiar, Horatian style of formal satire, strikingly anticipates Pope's Epistle to a Lady. All these poems of Rochester Pope knew; their relation with Pope's work deserves exploration; but it is not primarily on these that Vieth rests his case.⁵ He concentrates rather on the more ironical satires of Rochester: Upon Nothing, A Very Heroical Epistle, An Epistolary Essay, and deduces from them, in course of a detailed explication of their irony, an underlying attitude towards man and his relation to the cosmos similar to that which he finds explicit in Pope's Essay on Man.⁶

There is, however, a poem where Rochester makes explicit his ‘general map of man’, and which is in this respect the comparable poem to Pope's Essay. This is A Satyr against Mankind, of which it is surprising Vieth takes so little account. For while it resembles An Essay in its concern with humankind in general (differing from Satire VIII of Boileau, on which it is partly based, in its exclusion of social satire) it expresses a view of the natural order almost diametrically opposed to Pope's. An investigation of the Augustan nature of Rochester's work must take into account A Satyr against Mankind; I propose to comment on it here, with two other related poems, as a prelude to discussing A Very Heroical Epistle and An Epistolary Essay.

II

A Satyr against Mankind, like An Essay on Man, is a polemic against human pride, proceeding from a consideration of man's place in the universe to his behaviour to his fellow men. Each poem declares man's proper concern to be his immediate ‘environment’; Rochester maintains that

Our Sphere of Action, is life's happiness,
And he who thinks Beyond, thinks like an Ass

(ll. 96-7)

while Pope takes as his apparent premise the following lines:

          Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?

(I, ll. 17-20)

and at the beginning of Book IV he apostrophizes ‘Happiness’ as ‘our being's end and aim! / Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! whate'er thy name’ (ll. 1-2). But the fundamental conception of Pope's poem is that of the general yet particularly and vividly conceived hierarchy of creation, extending far above man and below, in which the wise, humble and pious person will know the proper place of his kind. It is a paradox from a modern positivist viewpoint that Pope, holding that we can reason only from what we know, should affirm the existence of this partly metaphysical hierarchy with such confident and splendid particularity. In Rochester no such paradox is found. In A Satyr against Mankind, the assertion of the hierarchy, of ‘the whole connected creation’, is left to the Adversary whose very intervention (and here I would differ from Pinto) Rochester has made subtly ridiculous, and whose views he strongly rebuts in other parts of the poem.⁷ The divine is gratified at Rochester's attack on wit, but is sufficiently unmoved by the terrible force of the preceding lines to get in a hint at the irony of it's being Wilmot who makes such an attack: ‘… but you take care, / Upon this point, not to be too severe.’ He then ludicrously displays his own vanity in wit:

Perhaps my Muse, were fitter for this part,
For I profess, I can be very smart
On Wit, which I abhor with all my heart:

(ll. 52-4)

following this up with the use of a metaphor (the ‘Tide of Ink’—l. 57) both clumsy and rather archaically metaphysical. The divine now proceeds with his counter-assertion of the dignity of man and of his connection with his Creator. There is a bland facility in his expression which speaks for itself.

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.

(ll. 60-5)

Next he praises Reason for enabling man to quest beyond material sense for knowledge of the cosmos, and imitates (as Pinto notes) a line from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura in praise of Epicurus.⁸ This is a subtle passage. The ideas it advances are of so traditional a kind that it seems at first sight possible that Rochester is allowing the divine to put them over to us straight. A closer look reveals a disturbing quality in the language of the divine. A man who can throw together so lightly the two adjectives ‘Blest glorious’ does not seem to be weighing his words, but to have a mechanically dutiful sense of the wonder of his theme. The vacuousness of the line: ‘Whom his great Maker took such care to make’ strengthens this impression and the whole passage, laden as it is with laudatory epithets, seems to be saying something altogether too good to be true. The line from Lucretius is interesting, and is perhaps ironical. If the divine is attempting to argue ad hominem, and enlist Rochester's favourite Lucretius in the defence of Reason, he only displays ignorance of his source. As Rochester well knew, Reason operating beyond the guidance of ‘material sense’ was precisely what Lucretius distrusted, concepts such as ‘Heav'n and Hell’ precisely what he praised Epicurus for exploding.⁹ Nearer to what would probably have won the approval of Lucretius is Rochester's own account of ‘right Reason’ in the latter part of this poem. Yet A Satyr is not entirely Lucretian; even the value of exploring the material universe, which Lucretius glories in, is doubted by Rochester's scepticism.

Thus the whole intervention of the divine, with its attempt to assert human dignity by reference to a divinely and benevolently ordered cosmic structure relating man to God, has been satirically undermined. What remains is the grim strength with which Rochester had described the human situation, before this ineffectual challenge was made:

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 dazled sight,
Till spent, it leaves him to eternal Night.

(ll. 12-24)

The verse of this passage enacts the failure to erect structures of knowledge or belief in which human life has a significant place. It justifies Pinto's insistence that Rochester is a poet of exploration; the imagery is almost that of pilgrimage, pilgrimage not towards a goal but in search of one. But the quest fails; man is left confronting ‘eternal Night’. This ‘Night’ is the darkness not of the unknown but of nullity, with which, on the extinction of Reason's deceptive light, human life is seen to be rounded. More specifically, and bearing in mind the possible parallel with Lucretius, ‘Night’ may express the extinction of the individual soul, and ultimately that of the universe.¹⁰ Yet the poem is not entirely nihilistic. ‘Our Sphere of Action, is life's happiness’—this still remains; within this sphere moral distinctions are still meaningful. It is here that Rochester's unfavourable comparisons of man to the lower animals, which come from Montaigne's Apologie de Raimond Sébond as well as from Boileau, are effectively introduced. Their force is greater than in Montaigne, for while he introduced them experimentally, as a kind of salutary medicine for human pride, within the wider and firm context of orthodox Christian belief, Rochester shows no such wider belief.¹¹ Thus while A Satyr against Mankind and An Essay on Man both seek to humble human vanity, they do so in opposite ways. Pope does so by depicting the divinely ordered hierarchy of creation of which man is merely a part; Rochester does so, in perhaps more devastating fashion, by showing the absence of such a hierarchy, the failure of man to fill and systematize the surrounding void. Pope's cosmos teems with life; Rochester's is almost empty. It is clear from this comparison that if D. M. Vieth is correct when he states that Rochester's ‘innermost values were as conservative as Pope's and more conservative, perhaps, than Dryden's’, conservatism must mean a fundamentally different thing in each case.¹²

The human predicament which Rochester expressed dramatically in A Satyr against Mankind he returned to in different ways in two probably later poems: Upon Nothing and the imitation from Seneca's Troades.¹³ The connections between A Satyr and Upon Nothing are clear; man's ‘Sphere of Action’ is surrounded by ‘eternal Night’ in the earlier poem, as here all things are snatched from Nothing only to be driven back to her ‘hungry Womb’ like slaves.¹⁴ It is the principle of the ‘Great Negative’ that Rochester is concerned to express, and it is both logically and poetically appropriate that a poem which enacts the collapse of man's attempt to erect a system or find a faith should be followed up by an ironical encomium upon Nothing. Rochester continues his polemic against the purveyors of religious or philosophical metaphysics:

Tho' Mysteries are barr'd from Laick Eyes,
And the Divine alone, with Warrant, pryes
Into thy Bosom, where the truth in private lies, …
Great Negative, how vainly would the Wise,
Enquire, define, distinguish, teach, devise?
Didst thou not stand to point their dull Philosophies.(15)

The truth sought after by Divines does not exist; the only significance of philosophy lies in the very void which it seeks to fill and rationalize. These statements are too close to the unambiguous passages of A Satyr against Mankind to be regarded as the reverse of what Rochester really means. This poem springs from the experience of scepticism and unbelief. Unless we are prepared to detach it from the rest of Rochester's work, in particular from the preceding Satyr against Mankind and the succeeding imitation of Seneca, we must have care how readily we accept it as the ‘most nearly archetypal expression’ of ‘the inverted world of Augustan satire’ and ‘an ironic eulogy of an Uncreation opposite to God's original act’.¹⁶ That Rochester had the deepest doubts about God's original act should be clear from the foregoing discussion.

Where then is the irony? It pervades the poem, but is of a less thorough-going kind than that, say, of Swift's Modest Proposal. It lies in the elevation of nullity to the status of a mock-positive deity, and in the tributes the poet makes to this goddess. Just as in Erasmus's Encomium Moriae a claim directly true is often served up in the guise of irony, so here statements in mock-praise of the goddess. Nothing contain a kernel of literal truth. Rochester has changed the manner with which he expresses an unchanged predicament. He has replaced the powerful directness of A Satyr by a complex mock-heroic mode, whose humorous ingenuity of wit and word keeps the grim truth at bay. This poem, elevating nothingness into a deity as it does, certainly resembles in method such Augustan mock-heroic poems as Mac Flecknoe, The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad; Pinto notes that ‘the Triumph of Dullness at the end of The Dunciad probably owes a good deal to Rochester's Triumph of Nothing’.¹⁷ That Pope learned much from this poem there can be no doubt; his imitation On Silence, of which two early manuscript versions exist, was begun in 1702 and underwent drastic revision before its publication in 1712. These early versions show that over a period of years the young Pope absorbed, understood and reflected on Rochester's poem.¹⁸ We can see that Nothing, Folly and Dullness are connected in the minds of both poets; also that both poems employ a manner at once comic and grand. But most significantly it is the conception of the ‘Great Negative’—Dullness or Nothing—that the two poems have in common. In the complexity of literary influences synthesized in Pope's mind to create The Dunciad, Rochester's Upon Nothing, with Milton's Chaos in the background, was the only one to suggest the mock-philosophical implications with which Dullness might be poetically endowed. At the beginning and end of Dunciad IV Dullness assumes an awesome generality; it is addressed as ‘eternal Night’, ‘Uncreating word’, ‘Universal Darkness’, (ll. 2, 654, 656) and in this elevated blend of irony and fear we do indeed, I believe, find Pope close to Rochester. At the same time we must remember that long and complex poem The Dunciad as a whole. One of its unifying factors, strong in the earlier books but increasingly submerged as Dullness moves to her triumph, is the mock-parallel to the action of Virgil's Aeneid. While it is expressively significant that the parallel should be submerged in this way, its presence in the poem is an assurance that there is a positive standard to which Pope adheres. There is no such factor in Upon Nothing. Though Matter, Form and ‘Rebel Light’, set up like Lucifer in opposition to the original deity, the ultimate victory belongs to Nothing, as in Milton Lucifer must finally submit to God. ‘Turn-Coat Time’ is on her side; it is in the nature of things that Nothing, which permeates all, should in the end claim all. It is not in the nature of things for Pope that Dullness must inevitably triumph. That she does triumph in the poem is a consequence of the actions of men. These inferences are strengthened when we look beyond the two individual poems; Rochester had but recently written A Satyr against Mankind, while Pope had not long written An Essay on Man. In short, Upon Nothing is a sceptical and nihilistic work, lacking the moral assurance we associate with the term Augustan in English literature.

Rochester's outlook emerges even more plainly in his imitation from Seneca's Troades. Not only does he follow Seneca in denying the immortality of the soul, but he also totally transforms the calm and quiescent tone of his original; he imputes to the nature of things an energy and violence with which he also animates his poem. He has given it a contemptuous and hostile spirit; Seneca pities those who hope for immortality, Rochester sees through them and despises them. That Rochester should have made this poem so much his own and of his time (Seneca's avidi becoming the ‘proud’ and ‘ambitious Zealot’, that is the Puritan) shows that the view he expressed in A Satyr he continued to hold into the last winter of his life. This is a poem written outside and against the Christian tradition as to the nature of man and the wider context in which the Christian believes mortal life is led. While Pope does not treat specifically of immortality in An Essay on Man he is, despite his protests, an unashamed metaphysician, viewing man and his relation to the created order in a way with which Hooker, for example, would have sympathized.¹⁹ The Augustan assurance which Rochester displays in the limited sphere of ‘An Allusion to Horace’—that of a man confident in a stable and satisfying pattern of values—is not found in the poems where Rochester writes of man in general and his relation to the natural order.

III

When we compare Pope's and Rochester's presentation of man in general, we see the stark contrast between a poet of unbelief and a poet of belief.²⁰ This is even apparent in the relation between Upon Nothing and The Dunciad, where in satiric conception and procedure Pope had so much to learn from Rochester. This conclusion is relevant to an assessment of A Very Heroical Epistle and An Epistolary Essay.²¹ These poems were once taken as direct expressions of Rochester's egoistic hedonism; Vieth's interpretation, on the other hand, parallels his interpretation of Upon Nothing and rests on the detection in each poem of ‘a distinctive Augustan poetical technique’: the use of systematic irony in a manner generally resembling The Dunciad, whose

structure functions through ironic approval of a spectrum of disvalues … diametrically opposed to the traditional Christian-classical standards shared by most of the contemporary audience. Whether the speaker of the poem is a persona who is himself satirized—a favorite device with Rochester—or remains anonymously omniscient, the satire operates by ironically replacing traditional norms with their direct contraries. …

(op. cit., p. 105)

Let us look at a passage from A Very Heroical Epistle. The speaker ‘Bajazet’ (Mulgrave) grandly absolves himself from any obligation to be constant in love:

You may as justly at the Sun, repine,
Because alike it does not always shine:
No glorious thing, was ever made to stay,
My blazing Star, but visits and away.
As fatal to it shines, as those 'ith'Skyes,
'Tis never seen but some great Lady dyes.
The boasted favor, you so precious hold,
To me's no more than changing of my Gold
What e're you gave, I paid you back in Bliss. …

(ll. 18-26)

Clearly these lines express the mentality of egoism and pride; the crucial question, however, concerns Rochester's and our moral relation to the persona. If the poem is indeed systematically ironical then he is inviting us to ridicule and condemn. Yet this passage has a certain ambiguity. Though the notion of ‘degree’ is sufficiently flouted by the speaker to give us the measure of his egoism, and his vanity comically underlined in lines 22-3 particularly, the passage is subtly contrived to invite to some degree the reader's identification and sympathy. The speaker's protestations are not entirely ridiculous: constancy is not the rule in nature, glorious things are transient, the image of the gold is a compliment as well as an insult, there is a certain justice in the last line. Much of this Vieth ingeniously admits: the ‘ironic inversion of traditional values undergoes a full 360 degrees rotation, so that passages taken out of context may seem to read quite straightforwardly’ (op. cit., p. 128). The plain truth is that the irony is not consistent, but weaker at some times than others, and often temporarily absent. Rochester has balanced our critical detachment against a chance to identify with the speaker; this accounts for the quality of exultation in the passage. To find a similar type of satire to this, we shall do better to look back to Rochester's admired Ben Jonson than forward to Pope. Volpone's opening address to his gold has a similar complex effect.²² Later in Rochester's poem the ironic ridicule grows stronger, and one thinks of Epicure Mammon rather than Volpone, but only at one point (the phrase: ‘Secure in solid Sloth’—l. 41) does a comparison with The Dunciad seem appropriate. I conclude that this poem is not a work of consistent satirical irony but one which seeks to explore a world of egoism in a less committed way. It is not surprising to find such ambiguity since we know from A Satyr against Mankind, written about this time, that the ‘Christian-classical’ conception of the metaphysical hierarchy of degree, which Rochester does allude to in the present poem, did not command his allegiance.

Rochester's Epistolary Essay From M.G. to O.B. Upon their mutual Poems is more ambiguous than A Very Heroical Epistle. Vieth is the first critic to read it, not as a kind of confession, but a work systematically deploying an ironical persona. It is on this interpretation of the poem itself that he builds his theory that ‘M.G.’ is MulGrave, ‘O.B.’ ‘Old Bays’ (i.e. Dryden); that the ‘mutual Poem’ is Mulgrave's and Dryden's collaborative Essay upon Satyr; and that the date of composition must therefore be 1679 rather than 1669 (op. cit., pp. 119-35). Certainly, many lines in this poem resemble the egoistic statements of A Very Heroical Epistle; but when read in their context they also have a cogency which does much to modify what might otherwise have been simple irony. Consider the following passage:

And this is all I'le say in my defence
T'obtain one Line of your well-worded sense,
I'le be content t'have writ the British Prince,
I'me none of those who think themselves inspir'd,
Nor write with the vain hope to be admir'd;
But from a Rule I have (upon long tryal)
T'avoid with care all sort of self-denyal.
Which way soe're, desire and fancy lead,
(Contemning Fame) that Path I boldly tread;
And if exposing what I take for wit,
To my dear self a Pleasure I beget,
No matter though the cens'ring Criticks fret.
These whom my Muse displeases are at strife,
With equal spleen against my course of life,
The least Delight of which I'le not forgo,
For all the flatt'ring praise Man can bestow.

(ll. 9-24)

We are struck first by the compliment to Dryden; here at least is a plausible judgement. To disclaim inspiration (l. 12) is not a mark of arrogance, nor is an indifference to admiration (l. 13); in fact ‘admiration’ probably does not carry the modern sense of well-grounded approval, but the older Horatian sense of uncritical adulation which we find in the Sixth Epistle of Horace's First Book (Nil admirari) and which Pope was to use some fifty years later: ‘With foolish Pride my Heart was never fir'd, / Nor the vain Itch t'admire, or be admir'd.’²³ M.G.'s contempt for ‘Fame’, which Vieth sees as a violation of the Augustan norm of deference to educated good taste, is in fact a perhaps equally Augustan scorn of capricious and uninformed public opinion. Such phrases as: ‘saucy Censurers’, ‘dull age’, ‘cens'ring Criticks’, ‘flatt'ring praise’ seem to confirm this reading. It is not clear that such ordinary sentiments must be ironically intended. But perhaps the challenging and egoistic statements make them so? Yet unlike those in A Very Heroical Epistle these lack any kind of comic inflation; in fact they are rather soberly put. Again Rochester is careful to blend the egoistic with the acceptable, so that each modifies the reader's reaction to the other. Having struck this balance in the earlier part of the poem, Rochester can introduce his comparison of writing verse to physical excretion without totally banishing our doubt that there could be some seriousness in its surface-meaning. Any identification with M.G. is reduced to the barest minimum by the sense of revulsion created, yet is there not some truth in the comparison? Is the poet, who in A Satyr against Mankind preferred the animals' life of desire and satisfaction to the human life of questing and pretension, incapable of suggesting that self-expression at its lowest may be a sufficient reason for writing verse? As an earlier critic points out, ‘his chase had a beast in view, the “happy beast”’.²⁴ Vieth defends his judgement that this passage is one of undiluted irony by reference to at first sight similar passages in Pope's Peri Bathous and Dunciad II ‘whose irony is beyond question’ (op. cit., p. 124). But Augustanism is not a set of absolute attitudes and conventions which all poets of the period use in the same way; that Pope wrote one way in 1728 does not mean that Rochester must have done exactly the same in 1679. The Epistolary Essay has now passed its climax; M.G.'s egoism has passed through its most objectionable phase, which is succeeded by a rearguard argument in his own defence. God is hardly generous in providing for man's needs; like a proud but impoverished Lord He keeps more creatures than He can maintain. Only of wit is this not held so, since no man could hold an opinion if he distrusted his own wit. Thus, says M.G., self-esteem is the only ‘fame’ that is meaningful. Again Vieth finds unmodified irony; these propositions violate the concept of the ‘great chain of being’ and the principle of plenitude to which, he argues, Rochester as a man of his age must subscribe. But A Satyr against Mankind and the imitation from Seneca show that these are precisely the notions to which Rochester did not subscribe; far from directing his irony towards a final condemnation of M.G.'s views, he seems to be following the argument to its conclusion with impartial interest. The speaker now regains a degree of assent from the reader; the quotation from Descartes in line 64, which Pope noted in the margin of his edition of Rochester, seems to clinch this; so does M.G.'s return, at the end of the poem, to the theme of his contempt for ‘common Fame’ and ‘Idle Rumour’.²⁵ I do not dispute that Rochester is using a persona in this poem, nor that M.G. is probably his enemy Mulgrave, and O. B. Dryden. These are valuable and to me convincing suggestions. My contention is rather that the irony of this poem is not a simple ‘180 degree reversal’ of traditional ‘norms’; it is spasmodic rather than systematic; the persona is made deliberately ambiguous so that Rochester is less attacking a complex of attitudes he already disapproves of than exploring a state of mind through the poem, and prompting approval or disapproval from the reader as each seems appropriate. Fittingly enough for a poet who did not subscribe to the ‘Christian-classical’ norms implicit and explicit in the work of Dryden and Pope, Rochester is less the resolved satirist here, than the satirically inclined explorer. There is thus some truth in the comments of those critics who, in this poem and A Very Heroical Epistle, sensed Rochester talking of himself.²⁶ There is nothing comparable to this effect in the formal satire of Pope whose subtler and more delicate personae invariably express different moods of himself as satirist. True, The Dunciad does explore as well as satirise the world of Folly, and Swift, in a manner closer to Rochester, uses personae to this end in A Tale of a Tub; to this extent the two poems of Rochester have affinities with these major achievements of Augustan satire.²⁷ But to find a better pattern for the way Rochester's satire works here we should look back, through the ambiguously satirical oratory of his own Alexander Bendo's Bill, to such protean satirical figures as Erasmus's Folly, Rabelais's Panurge or Cervantes's Quixote; Rochester's mood might sometimes be described as the soul of these satirists in a desolate world of doubt.²⁸

I have been led, in this essay, to apply the term ‘exploration’ to the poems discussed. Exploration should be regarded as one of the characteristic features of Rochester's poetry. Even if we turn to one of the formal satires most resembling Pope, Artemisa to Cloe, we notice that the ‘Fine Lady’ who tells among other things the story of Corinna is twice observed by Artemisa to be ‘So very wise, yet so impertinent’ (ll. 148-9, 256-7). Rochester thus introduces into the satire a note of ambiguity similar to that more strongly present in A Very Heroical Epistle and An Epistolary Essay. In the world of Rochester's satire wisdom and folly are often less distinct than in the formal satire of Pope; hence the quality of exploration. We get the same impression from the songs, still more from the biography: the picture of a man caught in a ‘Perplexity of endless Thought’, pleasing or otherwise; a man who in many respects lacked a stable pattern of any but the most elementary values, yet who was never without an obscure sense that there ought to have been more that he could believe. The contemptuous phrase ‘Lumber of the World’, in the imitation from Seneca, probably gets its bite from an opinion he confessed to Burnet about this time: ‘He said, They were happy that believed: for it was not in every man's power’.²⁹

The choice lies between regarding Rochester as a complete Augustan in the sense that Pope is an Augustan, or as a poet who, while Augustan and like Pope in some respects, has more in him of the adventurer through experience than Dryden or Pope. It is the choice between Rochester as a poet who, like Pope and Dryden, subscribed to a complex inheritance of ‘Christian-classical’ values, or as a poet in very many respects of scepticism and unbelief. The first view is that of D. M. Vieth, the second that of Pinto. The second, I suggest, is the more accurate of the two.

Notes

1. See V. de S. Pinto, Rochester: Portrait of a Restoration Poet, 1935, pp. x, 136, for his acknowledgement to earlier critics.

2. Pinto, op. cit., pp. 257-8; Enthusiast in Wit, 1962, p. 226; Rochester, Poems, ed. V. de S. Pinto, 1953, pp. xxxviii-xl; D. M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, 1963, pp. 106, 221, 271-2. Since the Rochester canon is still in some cases in dispute, I propose to confine my references to poems which Pinto and Vieth agree in attributing to him. Quotations from Rochester's poetry are from the above-mentioned edition.

3. The Works of John Earl of Rochester … Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1714, p. 156.

4. See Harold F. Brooks, ‘The “Imitation” in English Poetry’, Review of English Studies, 25 (1949), pp. 138-9.

5. Pope's knowledge of Rochester: see Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, ed. S. W. Singer, 1820, p. 281; Imitations of Horace, To Mr Murray, ll. 126-31 (cf. Artemisa to Cloe, ll. 44-5); A New Collection of Poems Relating to State Affairs, 1705, p. 258 in the British Museum copy, where Pope's manuscript annotation shows he knew ‘Tunbridge-Wells’ but attributed it to another hand.

6. D. M. Vieth, op. cit., pp. 109-26.

7. Pope, An Essay on Man, Argument of the First Epistle. Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit, p. 154.

8. Cf. A Satyr, l. 69; De Rerum Natura, I, ll. 72-4 especially 73; Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit, p. 153-4.

9. De Rerum Natura, I, ll. 62-79, 102-11. See Rochester, Poems, pp. 49-50.

10. Ibid., III, ll. 445-58, 926-30; V, ll. 235-46, 373-5.

11. See especially Montaigne's opening defence of Sébond for seeking to establish religious truths with reason. For specific parallels, see Rochester, Poems, pp. 215-19.

12. D. M. Vieth, op. cit., p. 221.

13. A Satyr against Mankind seems to have been written between 1674 and early 1676 (Poems, p. 214; Vieth, op. cit., p. 293). The earliest date we have for Upon Nothing is May 1678 (Vieth, op. cit., p. 399); it is probable though not certain that it post-dates A Satyr. Even were it contemporaneous, however, it would be hard to detach its attitudes from those of the longer, more explicit poem. The imitation from Seneca was probably written early in 1680 (Poems, pp. 179-80; Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit, pp. 187-90).

14. Thus Upon Nothing is not a strictly Lucretian poem; Lucretius rejects the idea that the universe emerged from nothing, as likely to foster theories of divine creation (De Rerum Natura, I, ll. 146-58). But from the human viewpoint a disintegration of the universe to its primary particles is as near a return to nothing as makes no matter.

15. Stanzas 8 and 10. The 1680 edition of Rochester's Poems on Several Occasions gives ‘thy truth’ for the last line of stanza 8 (ed. James Thorpe, 1950, p. 52) but the substantial sense remains the same.

16. Vieth, op. cit., p. 106.

17. V. de S. Pinto, ‘John Wilmot and the Right Veine of Satire’, Essays and Studies, 1953, p. 64.

18. The first manuscript version is printed in Pope, Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt, 1954, pp. 463-4; the second (almost certainly not in Pope's hand) is to be found in the British Museum, Add. MSS. 28253, ff. 135-6.

19. Cf. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. I, iii, 2 with An Essay on Man, I, ll. 233-58.

20. A distinction applied by Pinto to Rochester and Milton (Enthusiast in Wit, p. 114).

21. Vieth dates them respectively late summer 1675, and November or December 1679 (op. cit., pp. 107, 135).

22. Act I, Scene I, ll. 1-27; Rochester ‘An Allusion,’ l. 81. Though Jonson does subscribe to the metaphysic of ‘degree’ he lets too much exultation into Volpone's tone for the passage to be termed ‘ironical’.

23. Imitations of Horace, The Fourth Satire of John Donne, ll. 9-10.

24. Francis Whitfield, A Beast in View: A Study of the Earl of Rochester's Poetry, 1936, pp. 56-7. Cf. ‘Tunbridge-Wells,’ ll. 171-80; A Satyr against Mankind, ll. 1-7, 114-44.

25. See Vieth, op. cit., pp. 126-7.

26. See, e.g. Pinto, ‘John Wilmot and the Right Veine of Satire’, loc. cit., p. 62; Enthusiast in Wit, pp. 148-9.

27. On the exploration of folly in The Dunciad, see my article ‘The “New World” of Pope's Dunciad’, Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, 1964, pp. 739-60.

28. See Thomas Alcock and Rochester, The Famous Pathologist …, ed. V. de S. Pinto, Nottingham University Miscellany No. 1, 1961, pp. 32-8. It is relevant to note Alcock's description of Bendo ‘… in an old overgrown Green Gown which he religiously wore in memory of Rabelais his Master …’, op. cit., p. 29.

29. Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester …, 1680, p. 71. Rochester's basic values were summed up in what he told Burnet at the end of his life: the ‘Two Maxims of his Morality then were, that he should do nothing to the hurt of any other, or that might prejudice his own health. …’, ibid., p. 38, to which we should add his contempt for self-importance and pretension.