ROCHESTER.

1647-1680.

Born at Ditchley, in Oxfordshire-Educated at Oxford-Becomes a Favourite with Charles II.-Early and continued dissipation--His Quarrel with Lord Mulgrave-Burnet's Account of his last illness-Death and Burial at Spilsbury, in Oxfordshire-His Character as a Poet.

1

JOHN WILMOT, afterwards Earl of Rochester, the son of Henry, Earl of Rochester, better known by the title of Lord Wilmot, so often mentioned in Clarendon's History,' was born April 10, 1647, at Ditchley, in Oxfordshire. After a grammatical education at the school of Burford, he entered a nobleman into Wadham College in 1659, only twelve years old; and in 1661, at fourteen, was, with some other persons of high rank, made Master of Arts by Lord Clarendon in person.

He travelled afterwards into France and Italy; and, at his return, devoted himself to the Court. In 1665 he went to sea with Sandwich, and distinguished himself at Bergen by uncommon intrepidity; and the next summer served again on board Sir Edward Spragge, who, in the heat of the engagement, having a message of reproof to send to one of his captains, could find no man ready to carry it but Wilmot, who, in an open boat, went and returned amidst the storm of shot.

But his reputation for bravery was not lasting; he was reproached with slinking away in street quarrels, and leaving his companions to shift as they could without him; and Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, has left a story of his refusal to fight him.'

1 His mother was Anne, daughter of Sir John St. John, of Lyddiard, Wiltshire, and widow of Sir Francis Henry Lee, of Ditchley. She survived her celebrated son. His father died in 1657.

2 He had a quarrel with the Earl of Rochester, which he has perhaps too ostentatiously related, as Rochester's surviving daughter, Lady Sandwich, is said to have told him with very sharp reproaches.-JOHNSON: Life of Sheffield.

He had very early an inclination to intemperance, which he totally subdued in his travels; but when he became a courtier, he unhappily addicted himself to dissolute and vicious company, by which his principles were corrupted, and his manners depraved. He lost all sense of religious restraint; and, finding it not convenient to admit the authority of laws which he was resolved. not to obey, sheltered his wickedness behind infidelity.

As he excelled in that noisy and licentious merriment which wine incites, his companions eagerly encouraged him in excess, and he willingly indulged it; till, as he confessed to Dr. Burnet, he was for five years together continually drunk, or so much inflamed by frequent inebriety as in no interval to be master of himself.

In this state he played many frolics, which it is not for his honour that we should remember, and which are not now distinctly known. He often pursued low amours in mean disguises, and always acted with great exactness and dexterity the characters which he assumed.

He once erected a stage on Tower-hill, and harangued the populace as a mountebank; and, having made physic part of his study, is said to have practised it successfully.

He was so much in favour with King Charles that he was made one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and ranger of Woodstock Park.

Having an active and inquisitive mind, he never, except in his paroxysms of intemperance, was wholly negligent of study: he read what is considered as polite learning so much, that he is mentioned by Wood as the greatest scholar of all the nobility. Sometimes he retired into the country and amused himself with writing libels, in which he did not pretend to confine himself to truth."

His favorite author in French was Boileau, and in English Cowley.*

In the country Lord Rochester lived a blameless life; but he used to say (as Aubrey tells us) that "when he came to Brentford the devil entered into him, and never left him till he returned to the country again, to Adderbury or Woodstock Park.-MALONE:-Dryden, ii. 145, Additions, &c.

This is not in Aubrey's 'Lives,' as printed, but Malone had access to Aubrey's MSS., and meditated a publication from them.

4 That Cowley was his favourite author in English is stated by Burnet, but Burnet is contradicted by Dryden-a better authority on such a point. Lord Rochester said of Cowley,

Thus in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of all decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious obligation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and his health in lavish voluptuousness; till, at the age of one-and-thirty, he had exhausted the fund of life, and reduced himself to a state of weakness and decay.

At this time he was led to an acquaintance with Dr. Burnet, to whom he laid open with great freedom the tenor of his opinions, and the course of his life, and from whom he received such conviction of the reasonableness of moral duty, and the truth of Christianity, as produced a total change both of his manners and opinions. The account of those salutary conferences is given by Burnet in a book entitled 'Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester,' which the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety. It were an injury to the reader to offer him an abridgment."

He died July 26, 1680, before he had completed his thirty-fourth year; and was so worn away by a long illness that life went out without a struggle."

though somewhat profanely, "Not being of God, he could not stand."-Preface to Fables, 1700.

5 8vo. 1680. "Nor was the King displeased with my being sent for by Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, when he died: he fancied that he had told me many things of which I might make an ill use; yet he had read the book that I writ concerning him, and spoke well of it.-BURNET: Own Times, ii. 288, ed. 1823.

• I asked if Burnet had not given a good life of Rochester? Johnson: We have a good Death; there is not much Life.-Boswell by Croker, p. 559.

7 He was buried in the north aisle of Spilsbury Church, in Oxfordshire, but without a monument or inscribed stone to distinguish his grave. He ran away with, 26th May, 1665, and married 1666-7, Mrs. Elizabeth Mallet, of Enmere, in Somersetshire, a great heiress, by whom he left a son and three daughters. The son Charles, third and last Earl of Rochester, survived his father scarcely two years, and was buried 7th Dec., 1681, by his father's side. Elizabeth, the second daughter, married the third Earl of Sandwich, and died at Paris, 2nd July, 1757, seventy-seven years after her father. She had much of her father's wit. See Prior's verses on Wilmot's daughter in 'Drift,' i. 110. "He was a graceful and well shaped person," says Burnet, "tall and well made, if not a little too slender."

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.

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 the original collection was made, or by what authority its genuineness was ascertained. The first edition was published in the year of his death, with an air of concealment, professing in the title-page to be printed at 'Antwerp.'"

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 course of continual 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.

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 57. reward.-London Gazette, No. 1567, Nov. 22-25, 1680.

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., 1781-2, fetches a still larger price, but is not to be relied on. The castrated editions are common enough, but too incomplete.

His imitation of Horace and 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."

The strongest effort of his muse is his poem upon 'Nothing.' 911 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:

Molliter ossa quiescent

Sint modo carminibus non onerata malis."

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. 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 :

1

"Nothing, thou elder brother ev'n to Shade."

In this line, I know not whether he does not allude to a curious book 'De Umbra,' by Wowerus, which, having told the qualities of Shade, concludes with a poem, in which are these lines:

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.

11 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 barren subject.-ADDISON Spectator, No. 805.