Lord Rochester was eminent for the vigour of his colloquial wit, and remarkable for many wild pranks and sallies of extravagance. The glare of his general character diffused itself upon his writings; the compositions of a man whose name was heard so often were certain of attention, and from many readers certain of applause. This blaze of reputation is not yet quite extinguished; and his poetry still retains some splendour beyond that which genius has bestowed. Wood and Burnet give us reason to believe that much was imputed to him which he did not write. I know not by whom made, or by what authority its The first edition was published in air of concealment, professing in the original collection was 8 Of some of the pieces, however, there is no doubt. The 'Imitation of Horace's Satire,' the Verses to Lord Mulgrave,' the "Satire against Man,' the Verses upon Nothing,' and perhaps some others, are, I believe, genuine, and perhaps most of those which this collection exhibits.9 As he cannot be supposed to have found leisure for any The best portrait of Lord Rochester is the Sir Peter Lely, at Hinchinbrooke, the seat of the Earl of Sandwich. There is a large engraving of him by R. White (1681), considered the best print of him, and a smaller one by the same engraver prefixed to the first edition of Burnet's 'Some Passages,' &c., 1680. In his portrait at Warwick Castle he is represented crowning his monkey with laurel. 8 Whereas there is a Libel of lewd scandalous Poems lately printed, under the name of the Earl of Rochester, whoever shall discover the Printer to Mr. Thom L. Cary, at the sign of the Blew Bore, in Cheap-side, London, or to Mr. Will Richards, at his house in Bow-street, Covent Garden, shall have 5. reward.-London Gazette, No. 1567, Nov. 22-25, 1680. 9 The prefaces to Tonson's editions of 1691 and 1696 were written by Rymer, as I gather from a MS. note in Pope's copy of the edition of 1696. The heading to the poem M. G. to O. B., Pope has made M. C. to D. B.,' i. e. Martin Clifford to the Duke of Buckingham. Talking of Rochester's poems, he [Johnson] said he had given them to Steevens to castrate for the edition of the Poets to which he was to write prefaces.” -Boswell by Croker, p. 559. There is no good edition of Rochester's Poems: that professedly printed at Antwerp in the year in which he died is scarce and dear, but contains much that he never wrote; the still more obscene edition, 2 vols., 1731-2, fetches a still larger price, but is not to be relied on. The castrated editions are common enough, but too incomplete. 1647-1680. HIS POEM ON 'NOTHING.' 193 course of continued study, his pieces are commonly short, such as one fit of resolution would produce. His songs have no particular character; they tell, like other songs, in smooth and easy language, of scorn and kindness, dismission and desertion, absence and inconstancy, with the commonplaces of artificial courtship. They are commonly smooth and easy; but have little nature, and little sentiment. His imitation of Horace on Lucilius is not inelegant or unhappy. In the reign of Charles the Second began that adaptation, which has since been very frequent, of ancient poetry to present times; and perhaps few will be found where the parallelism is better preserved than in this. The versification is indeed sometimes careless, but it is sometimes vigorous and weighty.10 911 The strongest effort of his muse is his poem upon 'Nothing.' He is not the first who has chosen this barren topic for the boast of his fertility. There is a poem called 'Nihil' in Latin by Passerat, a poet and critic of the sixteenth century in France, who, in his own epitaph, expresses his zeal for good poetry thus: His works are not common, and therefore I shall subjoin his verses. In examining this performance, Nothing' must be considered as having not only a negative but a kind of positive signification; as I need not fear thieves, I have nothing, and nothing is a very powerful protector. In the first part of the sentence it is taken negatively; in the second it is taken positively, as an agent. 10 I remember I heard him [Andrew Marvell] say that the Earl of Rochester was the only man in England that had the true vein of satire.-AUBREY: Lives, iii. 438. Oldham is a very indelicate writer: he has strong rage, but it is too much like Billingsgate. Lord Rochester had much more delicacy, and more knowledge of mankind.-POPE: Spence by Singer, p. 19. French truth and British policy make a conspicuous figure in Nothing, as the Earl of Rochester has very well observed in his admirable poem on that barreu subject.-ADDISON: Spectator, No. 305. In one of Boileau's lines it was a question, whether he should use à rien faire, or à ne rien faire; and the first was preferred because it gave rien a sense in some sort positive. Nothing' can be a subject only in its positive sense, and such a sense is given it in the first line: "Nothing, thou elder brother ev'n to Shade." In this line, I know not whether he does not allude to a curious Terrasque tractusque maris, camposque liquentes Omnibus UMBRA prior." The positive sense is generally preserved, with great skill, through the whole poem; though sometimes in a subordinate sense, the negative nothing is injudiciously mingled. Passerat confounds the two senses. · Another of his most vigorous pieces is his lampoon on Sir Car Scroop, who, in a poem called The Praise of Satire,' had some lines like these:12 "He who can push into a midnight fray This was meant of Rochester, whose buffoon conceit was, I suppose, a saying often mentioned, that every man would be a coward if he durst; and drew from him those furious verses, to which Scroop made in reply an epigram, ending with these lines: "Thou canst hurt no man's fame with thy ill word; Thy pen is full as harmless as thy sword." 12 I quote from memory.-JOHNSON. The lines quoted are printed (though somewhat differently) in Villiers Duke of Buckingham's 'Works,' ii. 155, ed. 1775. 1647-1680. 'NIHIL' BY PASSERAT. 195 Of the satire against Man, Rochester can only claim what remains when all Boileau's part is taken away. In all his works there is sprightliness and vigour, and everywhere may be found tokens of a mind which study might have carried to excellence. What more can be expected from a life spent in ostentatious contempt of regularity, and ended before the abilities of many other men began to be displayed? Poema CI. V. JOANNIS PASSERATII, Quod nusquam est, potius nova per vestigia quæram. 13 13 Dryden dedicated to him his 'Marriage à-la-Mode' (1673); Otway his 'Titus and Berenice' (1677), and Crowne his Charles the Eighth of France' (1672). In Dryden's dedication there is a remarkable passage. "Your Lordship [he has been praising some papers of verses' which he had seen] has but another step to make, and from the patron of wit you may become its tyrant, and oppress our little reputations with more ease than you now protect them." This was prophetic. He oppressed Dryden, Otway, and Crowne, lampooned all three, and had Dryden cudgelled. Non timet insidias; fures, incendia temnit : Surdum audit loquiturque NIHIL sine voce, volatque Diique NIHIL metuunt. Quid longo carmine plura |