182 The Sheep's Skin pull'd off from the Wolf's back. With them he clubs, and hears them preach and pray, The better onely that he might betray: For every night the Knight is brought to bed, Of all the Treacherous Issue of his head, 36 To bring Fire, Sword, War, Dread, and Devastation, [In White-letter. No woodcut or printer's name. Date after October, 1679, and probably before the middle of August, 1680. Sir Robert Peyton was sent to the Tower, January 9th, 1638.] 1 Against Stephen Dugdale the evidence produced by Viscount Stafford, in his own defence, would have been considered overwhelming if justice, not prejudice, had swayed the mind of the Court. "That he was a person of an infamous life; that he had cheated the Lord Aston, his master, and defrauded the workmen and servants of their wages; that by his extravagancies and misdemeanours he had run himself into several pounds debt, for which he was thrown into gaol, and despaired of ever getting out from thence, otherwise than by making the pretended discoveries." Direct perjury and subornation were charged against him. 2 William Bedloe's death at Bristol, in August, 1680, was after the issue of this poem; judging from the way in which it mentions him. 3 Frank Smith, the libellous pamphleteer, a man of immoral life. See Bagford Ballads, pp. 928 and 1095. The recent Meal-Tub discovery by Sir William Waller, in August, 1679. John Gadbury, the astrologer, who was reputed to have had evil-connexion with Madam Cellier, in the Meal-Tub Plot. See Bagford Ballads, pp. 666, 703. The Unjust Judge's Creed Answered. "And when his bones are dust, his grave a blank, In chronological commemoration, Some dull MS. oblivion long has sank, Or graven stone found in a barrack's station, In digging the foundation of a closet, May turn his name up as a rare deposit.” Byron's Don Juan, Canto iii. st. 89, 1819. THE limits of our possible discoveries in solving difficult inquiries have been well defined by the philosophic Norwich physician, Sir Thomas Browne. Therefore we are consoled and encouraged, even when baffled for the moment in an attempt to identify the particular "Unjust Judge" here stigmatized. "What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture." (Hydriotaphia, cap. v. 1658.) Tiberius might ask them of the grammarians, and some twentieth-century Notes and Queries disinter them, to exercise the faculties of future antiquaries. At present we should feel more pleased to ascertain the name borne by the interlocutor whom the Newgate Ordinary confuted. There was no scarcity of Unjust Judges to pick and choose from, in those days. Scroggs, Jefferies, and Sir Francis Withens might have, like "The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claimed kindred there, and had his claim allow'd." We still seek other records of Mr. Ezekiel Edgworth. He may have been an ancestor, despite the difference in spelling, of the authoress whose Moral Tales used to be the favourite reading in many a family. The Archdeacon's Answer is not out of date now, two hundred years later than the first popularizing of the words "Sham" and "Tory." To us Indeed, the light cast on so important a subject as the religious and moral condition, or its reverse, among the leading minds belonging to the Bench and the Bar, is far worthier of attention than any merely private scandal limited to some one individual. it appears certain that the outrageous proceedings of the ultraprotestants could not fail to excite disgust, and encourage irreligion, among all who were able to think for themselves, unenslaved by either Romish superstition or political spite and sectarianism. The dreary blankness of total unbelief is a refuge sought by one class of reactionists, amid the clamour. A more devoted adherence to an uncompromising hierarchy, especially during the time when it is unjustly persecuted, is no less the refuge for men and women of a different temperament. Thus according to our native tendencies we incline towards a sensuous but stimulating religious faith and practice, although they may bring (as to the Jesuits) the agonies of martyrdom; or else we harden into the cold-blooded selfishness that is exposed to view in "The Unjust Judge's Creed," or into the cynical mockery of the "Satyr on Man." Yet must there have been, here or there, some quiet Church of England Christian who avoided either class of errors: And when religious sects ran mad, He held, in spite of all his learning, It will not be improved by burning. As appropriately closing this portion of the group, we here give two other poems of the Roxburghe Collection, although their date of issue has been left less defined than the rest. Chiefly they are valuable as proving what irreligion there was among men of quality, amid all the ravings against popery and superstition. Here is the secularism that some writers would encourage, to counteract sacerdotalism. [Roxburghe Collection, III. 837.] On Man: A Satire. BY A PERSON OF HONOUR. what Intent and Purpose was Man made, That in this slender Course of Life runs thro 8 12 And those that ne'er were Poets, yet write Plays; Insipid Squires, fat Bishops, Deans and Chapters, Enthusiasts, Prophecies, new Rants and Raptures; Half-witted Lords, double-chinn'd Bawds with Patches; Illiterate Courtiers, Chancery-suits for Life, Pox, Gouts, Catarrhs, old Sores, Cramps, Rheums, and Aches, A tracing Whore, and a most tedious Wife; Raw Innes-of-Court-men, empty Fops, Buffoons, FINIS. [In White-letter. No woodcut, printer's name, or date.] We have taken "On Man: a Satyr " to precede the other, as it agrees in principle with "The Unjust Judge's Creed," and the same. "Arch-Deacon's Answer" serves for both. Different from our Roxburghe Collection Poem is another "Satyr against Mankind, written by a Person of Honour," i.e. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. It is found in Mr. Frederick Ouvry's Collection (vol. iii. pp. 42-45), and also at the Bodleian, in Anthony à Wood's (417, article 7), beginning Were I, who, to my cost, already am One of those strange prodigious creatures Man, His senses are too gross; and he'll contrive A sixth, to contradict the other five; 4 8 Reason, an Ignis fatuus of the mind, Which leaves the Light of mature Sense behind. Pathless and dangerous, wand'ring wayes it takes, "An A long, dull, scurrilous poem (Wood's Coll., 417, article 8), Answer to the Satyr against Mankind," beginning "Were I to chuse what sort of Corps I'd wear, Not Baron Dog, Lord Monkey, or Earl Bear, But I'd be Man; was written by the Rev. Dr. Pocock]. It consists of one hundred and seventy-nine lines, in couplets and triplets. It is twice printed in Poems on State Affairs (i. Con., 254; and ii. 432). Again, there follows in Wood's Coll. (17, art. 9), "An Answer to the Mantuan, or False Character, lately wrote against Womenkind.” This vindication commences, "A vertuous Woman, O ye Gods! who dare Presume," etc. dated 1679, the year before the Earl of Rochester's death. It is With quiet sarcasm, Dr. Johnson declared that, "Of the Satire against Man, Rochester can only claim what remains when all Boileau's part is taken away." Not unchallenged may pass the Doctor's laudation of Burnet's "Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable JOHN, Earl of ROCHESTER, who died the 26th of July, 1680. Written by his own direction on his DeathBed, by Gilbert Burnet, D.D., 1680." Higher praise than it deserves is in the declaration that it is "a book which the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the Saint for its piety." Remembering the general offensiveness of many so-called "Religious Memoirs," Burnet's may pass current as less objectionable than others. The piety is simply professional, the philosophy by no means profound, and the elegance of an artificial character throughout. The Whig divine is attudinizing, as the converter of a gone-astray nobleman. Betrayal of death-bed secrets was not likely to be deemed a fault by a man of Burnet's worldly character and low-church principles. He was not one to share Jeremy Collier's righteous scruples, or to suffer imprisonment for them as a martyr. On the whole, however, the "Passages" remain interesting and acceptable, after allowance has been necessarily made for Burnet being the most unveracious of historians or biographers: owing to his intentional and his unintentional falsifications in all that he wrote. His perception of facts was far from vivid; his opinions were biassed by personal prejudices, and by inordinate self-conceit; his memory was defective, with an assumption of being retentive; and his most important statements were nearly always left wholly unsupported by other evidence than his own shifty word. So far, then, as we can admit Gilbert Burnet's testimony regarding Rochester, the following "Passages" are useful in connexion with the class of poems here mentioned, the satyric verses and lampoons on Man: "He laid out his Wit very freely in Libels and Satyrs, in which he had a peculiar talent of mixing his Wit with his Malice, and fitting both with such apt words that men were tempted to be pleased with them: from thence his Composures came to be easily known, for few had such a way of tempering these together as he had; so that when anything extraordinary that way came out, as a Child is fathered sometimes by its resemblance, so was it laid at his door as its parent and author. . . . The Licentiousness of his temper, with the briskness of his Wit, disposed him to love the conversation of those who divided their time between lewd Actions and irregular Mirth. And so he came to bend his wit, and direct his studies and endeavours to support and strengthen these ill Principles both in himself and others." (Pages 14-16, editio princeps.) This is written-prematurely, we think-of a time preceding the Dutch War in 1665. But Rochester was then not more than eighteen years old! So little can we ever depend on "the brawny Bishop" of Sarum; to whom we return in our "William and Mary Group." Considerable doubt exists as to the authenticity or genuineness of much that passed unchallenged as having been written by Rochester, circulating in manuscript during his lifetime, and in print bearing his name after his death. Truly, the whole of the fugitive-verse literature of that period requires careful examination, and we have sometimes hoped to present to our readers a volume devoted to such investigations. Attributed posthumously to Rochester are the following little-known stanzas, ridiculing the assumption of the Romanists to afford plenary indulgence and complete absolution for sins, in exchange for money: |