SOURCE: Munns, Jessica. “Daredevil in Thomas Otway's The Atheist: A New Identification.” Restoration 11, no. 1 (spring 1987): 31-8.

[In the following essay, Munns speculates on who Daredevil is supposed to represent in The Atheist, concluding that is most likely Otway's early patron, the Earl of Rochester.]

The role of Daredevil in Thomas Otway's last play, The Atheist (Dorset Garden, July 1683), presents problems. Although he is a minor character with no direct plot significance, he is the atheist of the title and he figures prominently in a number of scenes. Daredevil accompanies the hero, Beaugard, on most of his adventures, and in the final act he has some major scenes to himself. In these he languishes on his death-bed and pours out a penitent confession of his sins to Beaugard's old father, who is disguised as a parson. When it is proved to him that he is not dying, he repents of his repentance and reassumes his atheistical stance. R. D. Hume has argued that Daredevil fits into the play's overall theme of “authority and rebellion.”¹ Nevertheless, it is odd that an essentially secondary character should figure in the title and in so many scenes. It therefore seems probable that Daredevil has an extra-dramatic function as a satiric portrait and that the minor plot centered around him, the unmasking of a sham atheist, was inspired by contemporary characters and events.

In his article “An Attack on Thomas Shadwell in Otway's The Atheist,” J. C. Ross provides evidence for identifying Daredevil with Thomas Shadwell.² However, this identification does not explain many of Daredevil's marked characteristics and activities, which seem to have little relevance to Shadwell. Nor, I feel, does it explain the deep anxiety Otway expresses in his Dedicatory Epistle to Lord Elande over the “many Enemies, and very industrious ones too,” who have attacked the play.³ I suggest that the character of Daredevil represents not a portrait of Shadwell but rather a portrait of the Earl of Rochester.

The main points of Ross's identification relate to Daredevil's puzzling reference to having been indicted as a “Papist” (II. 367-70), to his sham-atheism, and to the slight wound which provokes his craven death-bed repentance. Ross points to newspaper attacks on Shadwell in January 1681/2 which accuse him of Roman Catholicism and contain an anecdote of the poet making a confession of sins after receiving a mild wound and relapsing upon recovery.⁴ A further identification is sought in Daredevil's confession in which he repents of having seduced his best friend's young wife (V.821,827). This incident faintly recalls the cuckolding plot of an earlier comedy, Friendship in Fashion (Dorset Garden, 1678), and Ross follows R. G. Ham in speculating that something in the earlier play, possibly the cuckolding plot, led to a breech between Otway and Shadwell.⁵ Certainly their close friendship, which is noted in A Session of the Poets (c. 1676) where Otway is described as “Shadwell's dear Zany,” ceased around the late 1670s. Otway lampooned Shadwell in The Poet's Complaint of His Muse (1680), and the compliment was returned by Shadwell (if indeed he is the author) in The Tory Poets. Ross, in fact, suggests that Otway was retaliating to this attack in The Atheist. There can be no doubt that Otway attacks Shadwell in the Prologue to The Atheist (ll. 43-47), and Ross concludes that, given the political rift between Otway and Shadwell in the 1680s, if Otway inadvertently insulted Shadwell in Friendship in Fashion, by the time he wrote The Atheist his intentions were quite clear.⁶

The evidence Ross accumulates cannot be ignored, but it can be challenged. Cuckoldings are such stock material in Restoration comedies that one hesitates to assign particular victims. Further, the very openness of the attack on Shadwell in the Prologue might be seen to preclude a more covert and hidden attack in the play itself. The Prologue attack draws heavily on Dryden's MacFlecknoe and presents a familiar portrait of a dull and blundering poet which bears no resemblance to the cowardly but witty Daredevil. It does not make sense to suppose that the Prologue introduces an attack on Shadwell in one mode and then the play continues the attack under an entirely different characterization. More simply, we may suppose that for reasons largely political and possibly personal, Otway attacks Shadwell in the Prologue and someone else in the play.

The newspaper evidence offers an explanation of Daredevil's indictment as a papist: it is, however, worth remembering Rochester's involvement with Roman Catholicism. During the early years of his marriage, Rochester, for as yet obscure reasons, persuaded his wife to convert to Catholicism, reconverting her to Anglicanism on his death-bed.⁷ Daredevil's comic indignation at the indictment may be a parody of Shadwell's reactions to the accusation, but just as probably the slur of “papism” may glance at Rochester.

Otway's concern over the “many Enemies” his play has made suggests a more powerful opponent than Shadwell. In 1683 Otway's star, never very high, was nevertheless in the ascendant following his highly successful play, Venice Preserv'd (Dorset Garden, 1682), which was widely hailed as a Tory masterpiece. In A Supplement to the Late Heroick Poem (1682), for instance, Otway is celebrated as Shadwell's antagonist and victor: “Lift up your Heads ye Tories of the Age, / Let Otway tumble Shadwell from the Stage.”⁸ Shadwell, on the other hand, was in a weak position following Charles II's triumphant quashing of the Whig opposition. Shaftesbury had died in exile in 1682, and by June 1683, following the discovery of the Rye House Plot, those Whigs who remained in England and out of prison were keeping a low profile.⁹ Shadwell had no new play produced following The Lancashire Witches (Dorset Garden, 1681) until 1688, and it is unlikely that he would have had the power or prestige to launch a strong attack on Otway. Shadwell, in fact, was a relatively safe target—as the openness of Otway's attack on him in the Prologue indicates.

Despite the anecdote Ross found concerning Shadwell's wound and repentance, Rochester was by far the most famous death-bed penitent in the 1680s. Indeed, the newspaper's tale probably reflects the interest (and scepticism) in death-bed repentance aroused by Rochester's death. Rochester's life, views on religion, illness, and conversion were widely known following the publication of Gilbert Burnet's Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (1680). Robert Parson's A Sermon Preached at the Funeral of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (1680) also dwelt on the sincerity and piety of Rochester's penitence and conversion, as did many of the elegiac verses poured out by friends and admirers.¹⁰ The family and friends of the Earl of Rochester were powerful and deeply committed to defending his memory; nevertheless, they could not still doubts concerning the sincerity or validity of his repentance. His friend William Fanshawe, for instance, attributed his conversion to delirium.¹¹ Although this was strongly denied by Rochester's mother, Anne, Countess Dowager of Rochester,¹² the opinion of many of the London wits and poets was closer to Fanshawe's than the dowager Countess'.

Rochester was mourned somewhat ambiguously by Nathaniel Lee in his play The Princess of Cleve (Dorset Garden, 1680/81?). The rake hero, the Duke of Nemours, celebrates the recently dead “count Rosidore” as the “Spirit of Wit,” stating that he “had such art in guilding his / Failures, that it was hard not to love his Faults” (I. 101-102).¹³ More tellingly, the Duke of Nemours, attractive, witty, debauched and poxy, is very probably a portrait of Rochester. At the end of the play Nemours repents of his vicious life, and his words reflect critically on Rochester's death-bed repentance: “He well repents that will not Sin, yet can, / But Death-bed Sorrow rarely shews the Man” (V. 302-303). The exact date of the first performance of The Princess of Cleve is not known, but it seems to have had only a very short run in late 1680 or early 1681 and was not revived. The work was not published until 1689, an unusually long gap at this period between performance and publication dates, and R. D. Hume has speculated that fear of reprisals by Rochester's family may have insured the delay.¹⁴

John Crowne's City Politiques (Theatre Royal, Jan. 1683) features two rakes, Artall and Florio, who feign dying repentance to cuckold and manipulate those around them. Crowne suffered very directly for these portraits: he was cudgelled by a man who said “hee did it at the suite of the Earle of Rochester some time deceased who was greatly abused in the play for his penetency.”¹⁵ Any playwright whose work could be interpreted as casting aspersions on the Earl of Rochester's “penetency” would certainly have “great need of such Protection” as his patron could afford.¹⁶

The possibility that Daredevil's death-bed fears and penitence, followed by his scoffing denials of repentance, could be interpreted as an insulting reference to Rochester is obvious. Lee's and Crowne's plays set a precedent for this type of dramatic portrait, and their works would still have been remembered in 1683. Otway had already shown an interest in Rochester's conversion and had alluded to it in Venice Preserv'd. As Pierre mounts the scaffold, he dismisses the priest who offers him religious consolation and asks that “This fellow write no lyes of my conversion, / Because he has crept upon my troubled hours” (V.391-92). Clearly, like so many of his contemporaries, Otway was fascinated and disturbed by the character of the Earl of Rochester and sceptical of his strangely exemplary end.

Apart from the death-bed scenes, there are other incidents in The Atheist which may well refer to Rochester. Throughout the play Daredevil's cowardice is emphasized; not only is he, in fact, terrified of the devil (I.335-42, II.415-18), he is also fearful of fighting. He is shown trying to avoid duels (III.324-27, IV.610), and when Beaugard is set upon by ruffians, Daredevil fails to come to his assistance (III. 336-44). Shadwell did not have a great reputation for courage, but neither was he associated with cowardice in duels or with leaving his friends in the lurch. Rochester, however, had (if unfairly) gained a bad reputation in just these areas. The Mulgrave-Dryden satire, An Essay Upon Satire (1679), depicts Rochester as a blustering and cowardly bully:

For what a Bessus hath he always lived,
And his own kicking notably contrived?
For there's the folly that's still mixed with fear:
Cowards more blows than any hero bear,
Of fighting sparks some may their pleasure say,
But 'tis a bolder thing to run away.

(ii.244-49)

Mulgrave refers here to his own abortive duel with Rochester in 1669 when, according to Mulgrave, Rochester feigned sick to avoid the fight and “entirely ruined his reputation as to courage.”¹⁷ The lines also refer to Rochester's role in the Epsom Downs fracas of 1676. On that occasion, Rochester and a group of friends wound up an evening of varied drunken activities with a confrontation with the constable and his watch. In the scuffle that followed, Rochester drew on the constable, and when one of his friends, Mr. Downs, attempted to intervene and was set upon by the watch, Rochester and his company ran away. Downs was left to be so severely beaten that he died ten days later.

The event was widely reported in letter and verse. Andrew Marvell described the event caustically to one of his correspondents: “Rochester said to have first ingaged & fled and abjectly hid himselfe when the rest were exposed.”¹⁸ Sir Carr Scroope commented on the affair in his Defence of Satire (1677), describing Rochester as one who

To fatal midnight frolics can betray
His brave companion and then run away,
Leaving him to be murdered in the street,
Then put it off with some buffoon conceit.

(ll.52-55)¹⁹

Thomas D'Urfey also alludes to the affair in a satiric song describing how Rochester

… for the noble name of Spark
does his companions rally;
Commits an out-rage in the dark,
then sneaks into an Ally.(20)

Rochester himself wrote of the incident in “To the Postboy,” where he notes with quiet disgust that, “frighted by my own mischiefs, I have fled / And bravely left my life's defender dead.”²¹ Daredevil is undoubtedly to a large extent a type character of the blustering bully. Nevertheless, his eager enthusiasm for violent frolics—“Let us fire a House or two, poison a Constable and all his Watch, ravish six Cinder-women, and kill a Beadle” (III.281-83)—and his failure to defend his friend when he is attacked in the street are reminiscent of contemporary views on Rochester's character and conduct.

Daredevil's love of debauchery may relate him to Shadwell or, indeed, to many Restoration gentlemen, but one of his particular tastes suggests a further link with Rochester. Twice in the play reference is made to Daredevil's propensity for “Ballum-rancum,” naked dancing. Beaugard describes him as a “very good odd Man at Ballum-rancum” (II.360-61) and, later on, Daredevil is delighted to find himself in what he takes to be a “bawdy Dancing School” where “some better Whores than ordinary designing a private Ballum-rancum, have pitcht upon our two proper persons for the bus'ness” (III.577-80). There are no reasons to associate Shadwell with naked dancing, but contemporary gossip did associate Rochester with a taste for naked frolics. In his early years in London, Rochester was a member of a club devoted to debauchery, The Ballers, and we have Pepys's shocked and excited account of overhearing members discuss “my lady Bennet and her ladies, and there dancing there naked, and all the rougish things in the world.”²² In 1677 Rochester caused considerable scandal when reports reached London that he and some friends had frisked around naked in Woodstock Park. Robert Harley wrote in disgust to his father about the “beastly prank.”²³ Rochester's friend, Henry Savile, warned him that “there has been such a story made concerning your last adventure as would perswade us grave men that you have stripped yourselfe of all your prudence as well as of your breeches.”²⁴ Daredevil's taste for naked dancing fits in with his general love of debauchery but is an unnecessary detail. It is probable that the references to “Ballum-rancum” are there to remind the knowing in the audience of Rochester's scandalous inclination to frisk around naked.

Most of the further incidents which may relate to Rochester are connected with Daredevil's religious scepticism. The publication of Burnet's Some Passages, in which Burnet describes his conversations about religion with Rochester and details the Earl's pre-conversion free-thinking, promoted Rochester's reputation as a libertine as much as it enhanced his image as a penitent. In Act II Daredevil boasts to Beaugard and his friend Courtine of his contempt for religion and scorn for the devil. Then, just as he and Beaugard are about to leave in search of amusement (girls and brawls), he makes a curious pact with Courtine:

… if either of us are run through the Lungs, or shot in the Head, before we meet again let us hear from one another out of the Lower World how matters go there, and what Entertainment they give us.

(III.296-300)

These lines are reminiscent of a similar pact, described by Burnet in Some Passages, which the young Rochester made before the Battle of Bergen in 1665:

There happened to be in the same Ship with him Mr. Mountague and another Gentleman of Quality, these two, the former especially, seemed perswaded that they should never return to England … The Earl of Rochester, and the last of these entered into a formal Engagement, not without ceremonies of Religion, that if either of them died, he should appear and give the other notice of the future State, if there was any.

(pp. 16-17)

Montague and the other gentleman were killed in the engagement, but “that gentleman never appearing was a great snare to him, during the rest of his life” (p. 18). Daredevil's semi-jesting pact is in character but is inessential. As with the other incidents isolated, it takes on significance when related to Rochester. It becomes clear that in building up his portrait of a foolish debauchee, Otway was selecting some of the more juvenile and disreputable incidents from his former patron's life.

Daredevil's firm preference for the law over religion as a means of enforcing morality (II.381-89) recalls Burnet's account of Rochester's desire for “rules” to “mend the discords in our nature” rather than religious injunctions. Similarly, Daredevil's materialism and contempt for hell (II.390, 411-14) sound like crude versions of the Earl's troubled musings on morality and a “Supreme Being” in talks with Burnet, or his account of mortality and decay in his verses “After death nothing is, and nothing, death.”

Daredevil's defiant atheism is sustained by heavy drinking. Deep drinking has been cited by Ross as one of Shadwell's characteristics which links him to Daredevil, but the connection made between Daredevil's love of drink and his outrageous ideas may also have a source in Burnet. Rochester admitted to Burnet that “for five years together he was continually drunk … This led him to say and do many wild and unaccountable things” (p. 12). Daredevil admits to his friends that “I am never so well satisfied with my out-of-the-way Principles, as when I am drunk, very drunk” (II.462-63). Daredevil is not simply a run-of-the-mill drunk, but a man who needs drink as a “Quieter of the Mind” (II.464). This hint at a troubled mind gives a sudden and unexpected depth to Daredevil's characterization. Although the depth is not sustained, this moment of penetration behind a carefree facade is more relevant to the reflective and troubled Earl of Rochester than to the companionable, deep-drinking Shadwell.

A connection is made between Daredevil and the theater when Daredevil claims to be acquainted with the Duke's House poets: “They are most of 'em my Disciples in their Hearts, and now and then stand up for the Truth manfully” (II.480-83). Ross sees this as a reference to Shadwell, a prominent Duke's House playwright.²⁵ The comment is, however, just as apt with reference to Rochester who, like many of the wits, took a keen interest in the theater. He had patronized Otway, himself a Duke's House playwright, as well as John Crowne, Nathaniel Lee, Elkanah Settle, and Sir Francis Fane, all of whom had works performed at the Duke's House. He had also taken a more than passing interest in one of the company's actresses, Mrs. Barry, by whom he had a daughter.

The political climate of 1683 would surely make political commentary out of any reference to Duke's House writers as Shadwell's secret admirers and “Disciples”. However, it is unlikely that Otway, a staunch Tory and Duke's House regular, would wish to suggest that his theater was a nest of sedition or that he and his fellow poets all really supported Shadwell in their “Hearts.” It is one thing to suggest that poets are attracted to drink, debauchery, and free-thought and quite another to claim that they are anti-government Whigs. The comment on the poets' covert admiration makes sense in terms of the plays by Lee and Crowne in the 1680s, which mock Rochester's death-bed repentance yet also display an admiration for his wit, charm, and panache. It is also worth remembering that if, as is generally accepted, Dorimant in Etherege's The Man of Mode is a portrait of Rochester, then it was in a play performed at the Duke's House that Rochester appeared at his most fascinating:

I know he is a devil, but he has something of the angel yet undefaced in him, which makes him so charming and agreeable that I must love him, be he never so wicked.

(II.ii.15-17)²⁶

Finally, if Daredevil is a satiric portrait of Shadwell, surely he would be depicted as a pathetic rhymster and failed poet—as Shadwell is in the Prologue—and not as a witty, if atheistical, gentleman. There are no references to Daredevil as a writer; rather he is seen as a gentleman friend/patron of poets. Daredevil describes himself as belonging to an ancient family (III.86-89), and throughout he is portrayed as a gentleman, albeit a very debauched one (no disqualification). Beaugard describes him as “Barring his Darling—Topick, Blasphemy, a Companion pleasant enough” (I.368), and Daredevil is shown taking his place naturally in the company of other leisured men-about-town. It would almost be a compliment to Shadwell to present him as a well-born debauchee rather than as a hard-working playhouse drudge.

On the other hand, should Otway have wished to debase Rochester and dismantle his reputation for daring and charm, what more insulting method could he have chosen than to portray him as an hypocritical and cowardly rake, tolerated by his companions because his jokes are occasionally funny and his folly always amusing? Such a portrayal very effectively strips Rochester of the glamour which still clings to him in Lee and Crowne's works. Such a portrayal is also in line with many of the verse satires on Rochester, some of which have been cited. As David Vieth points out, during Rochester's last years lampoons of him took a “hostile turn,” and “Notable new features are the references to cowardice, blasphemy, and deceit, as well as the suggestion that Rochester was considered a devil.”²⁷ The very name Daredevil may have indicated Rochester to the knowing readers of lampoons in the audience.

The question left to be considered is why Otway should have wished to attack Rochester. Rochester had been an important and generous patron to Otway at the beginning of the poet's dramatic career. Rochester recommended Don Carlos (Dorset Garden, 1676) to the King and the Duke of York, for which Otway thanked him effusively in the Preface to the play. Otway dedicated his next two plays, Titus and Berenice and The Cheats of Scapin (Dorset Garden, 1677), to Rochester. Leaving aside the probably untrue accounts of a rivalry between Otway and Rochester over Mrs. Barry, there seem few grounds for hostility during Rochester's lifetime.

The situation changed after Rochester's death in 1680 when an unauthorized edition of his poems was published, Poems on Several Occasions By the Right Honourable, the E. of R———. This is a wildly inaccurate edition containing many poems which are not by Rochester and which Otway would surely have recognized as belonging to other hands. But some of the poems, like “An Allusion to Horace,” are unmistakably Rochester's, and that particular poem contains a very unflattering reference to Otway. The edition also contains the notorious A Session of the Poets, which is deeply insulting towards Otway with its references to his poverty, mange, and lice and description of him as the “scum of a Play-house.” In The Poet's Complaint of His Muse, Otway attributes the poem to Elkanah Settle, whom he attacks vehemently. Rightly or wrongly, Otway may have decided subsequently that the work was Rochester's.²⁸ Had Otway also at this time come across Rochester's “Epigram on Thomas Otway,” he would have had to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that the man whom he admired, and whom he hoped had some respect for him, thought him a “blustering bard,” unsuccessful, mangy, and louse-ridden to boot. If that is the case, it is not surprising to find a cynical reference to Rochester's conversion in Venice Preserv'd and an all-out attack on the man in The Atheist. All of Otway's plays attest to his passionate commitment to the ideal of friendship and his horror of betrayal. Contemporary accounts point to his pride and touchiness; it would be all of a piece for the poet and the man to react strongly to what he believed was scorn of his art and betrayal of his trust.

Rochester's family and friends had already shown themselves to be sensitive to slurs to his reputation. They had the power to make their anger felt and it is surely they who represent the “many enemies” Otway feared. How far he escaped their wrath is open to conjecture. He was not cudgelled like Crowne. Publication of his play was not delayed. It is notable, however, that despite the popularity (and Tory loyalty) of Venice Preserv'd, Otway's fortunes declined. The Atheist is Otway's last play. He died two years after its production, and even the least sensational accounts attest to the fact that he died in poverty.

Notes

1. Robert D. Hume, “Otway and the Comic Muse,” SP, 73 (1976), 87-116, 106.

2. J. C. Ross, “An Attack on Thomas Shadwell in Otway's The Atheist,” PQ, 52 (1973), 753-60.

3. The Works of Thomas Otway, Plays, Poems and Love-Letters, ed., J. C. Ghosh (1932; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), II, 294. All citations from Otway are taken from this edition.

4. J. C. Ross, p. 760.

5. J. C. Ross, p. 759; Roswell G. Ham, Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age (1931; rpt. New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), p. 102.

6. J. C. Ross, p. 760.

7. See Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester (London, 1680), p. 143, and Graham Greene, Lord Rochester's Monkey (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 169-71.

8. Cited by Ghosh, Works, I, 29.

9. Richard Duke's Epilogue to The Atheist celebrates the fact that “the Whig-Tyde runs out, the Loyal flows” (ll. 15). See also J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), on the Whigs' “total submission and inactivity” following 1683. Jones also states that “their strength declined catastrophically even before their loss of control over London and the repression which followed the ‘discovery’ of the Rye House Plot” (pp. 211-16).

10. See, for instance, Samuel Woodforde's elegiac ode which depicts the erstwhile sinner being welcomed to heaven, reprinted in Rochesteriana, ed. Johannes Prinz (Leipzig, 1926), p. 68.

11. Rochesteriana, p. 57.

12. The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 253.

13. The Works of Nathaniel Lee, ed. Thomas B. Stroup and Arthur L. Cooke, II (New Brunswick, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1955-56). All citations from Lee are taken from this edition.

14. Robert D. Hume, “The Satiric Design of Nat. Lee's The Princess of Cleve,” JEGP, 75 (1976), 117-38, 130. Hume points out that “we can conclude that Rochester's debauchery and penitence remained topical in 1683 and that to attack him for them was physically dangerous” (p. 130).

15. Hume, p. 129.

16. Otway, Dedicatory Epistle to Lord Elande, Works, II, 293.

17. From Mulgrave's Memoirs, cited in An Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan satirical Verse, 1660-1714, ed. George deF. Lord (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 194-95; the lines from An Essay Upon Satire are also from the above edition.

18. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed. rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 344-45.

19. An Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State, p. 177.

20. David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), p. 181.

21. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), p. 130. All citations from Rochester's verse are taken from this edition.

22. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, IX, ed. Robert Latham and William Mathews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1976), 30 May 1668.

23. Portland Mss, Webeck Abbey, Sept. 11th, 1677, cited in The Collected Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. John Heywood (London: Nonesuch Press, 1926), xii.

24. The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, p. 157. Rochester's reply refers to yet another naked dance: “And now Mr. Savile, since you are pleased to quote yourself for a grave man of the number of the scandalized, be pleased to call to mind the year 1676, when two large fat nudities led the coranto round Rosamund's fair fountain while the poor violated nymph wept to behold the strange decay of manly parts since the days of her dear Harry the Second” (p. 159). It is interesting to note that in Some Passages Burnet cites Rochester's comparing moral sentiments to clothes, which are worn out of good manners: “They went always in Cloaths, though in their Frolicks they would have chosen sometimes to have gone naked, if they had not feared the people” (p. 23). Rochester had reason to fear the people on this issue.

25. J. C. Ross, p. 754.

26. George Etherege, The Man of Mode, ed. W. B. Carnochan, Regents Restoration Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967).

27. D. M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, p. 180.

28. See Vieth's survey of ascriptions and discussion of this issue in Attribution in Restoration Poetry, pp. 296-321.