John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was born at Ditchley, Oxfordshire, 10th April 1647, and was educated at Burford school and Wadham College, Oxford. He travelled in France and Italy, and then repaired to court, where his handsome person and lively wit made him a prominent figure. In 1665 he showed conspicuous courage against the Dutch. With his friend Windham he had engaged that, “if either of them died, he should appear and give the other notice of the future state, if there was any.” Windham was killed, but did not disturb the rest of his friend, who now plunged into a life of the grossest debauchery and buffoonery, yet wrote excellent letters, personal satires, bacchanalian and amatory songs, and verses too often obscene and licentious. At the last he was moved to repentance by Bishop Burnet, and died 26 July 1680. His verses show more wit than poetry, but he possessed a rich gift of satire. Among the best of his poems are an imitation of Horace on Lucilius, Verses to Lord Mulgrave, a Satire against Man, and Verses upon Nothing.

Personal

  A very prophane wit.

  To the King’s everlasting shame, to have so idle a rogue his companion.

  For the benefit of all those whom I have drawn into sin by my example and encouragement, I leave to the world this my last declaration, (which I deliver in the presence of the great God, who knows the secrets of all hearts, and before whom I am now appearing to be judged;) that, from the bottom of my soul, I detest and abhor the whole course of my former wicked life; that I think I can never sufficiently admire the goodness of God, who has given me a true sense of my pernicious opinions and vile practices, by which I have hitherto lived, without hope and without God in the world; have been an open enemy to Jesus Christ, doing the utmost despite to the Holy Spirit of Grace. And that the greatest testimony of my charity to such is, to warn them, in the name of God, and as they regard the welfare of their immortal souls, no more to deny his being or his providence, or despise his goodness; no more to make a mock of sin, or contemn the pure and excellent religion of my ever blessed Redeemer; through whose merits alone, I, one of the greatest of sinners, do yet hope for mercy and forgiveness. Amen.
  Declared and signed in the presence of
      Anne Rochester,
      Robert Parsons.

  Wilmot, earl of Rochester, was naturally modest till the court corrupted him. His wit had in it a peculiar brightness, to which none could ever arrive. He gave himself up to all sorts of extravagance, and to the wildest frolics that a wanton wit could devise. He would have gone about the street as a beggar, and made love as a porter. He set up a stage as an Italian mountebank. He was for some years always drunk, and was ever doing some mischief. The king loved his company for the diversion it afforded, better than his person; and there was no love lost between them. He took his revenges in many libels. He found out a footman that knew all the court, and he furnished him with a red coat and a musket as a centinel, and kept him all the winter long every night at the doors of such ladies as he believed might be in intrigues. In the court a centinel is little minded, and is believed to be posted by a captain of the guards to hinder a combat: so this man saw who walked about and visited at forbidden hours…. In the last year of his life I was much with him, and have writ a book of what pass’d between him and me. I do verily believe he was then so entirely changed, that, if he had recovered, he would have made good all his resolutions.

  Lord Rochester was of a very bad turn of mind as well as debauched. [From the Duke of Buckingham and others that knew him.]

  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 vitious 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…. He confessed to Dr. Burnet, he was for five years together continually drunk, or so much inflamed by frequent ebriety, as in no interval to be master of himself…. 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…. Thus in a course of a 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.

  It is not now meant to deny many of the charges made against the character of Rochester, though some of them rest on very slender foundation; and when his memory has, for a century and a half, been loaded with unalloyed obloquy, it might seem the height of folly to offer any thing in its vindication; but if we can shew his character in a more amiable or less odious light, justice demands that his memory should have the benefit of it: and if we can prove that, notwithstanding all his dissipation, and “lavish voluptuousness,” he was an affectionate husband, and a fond father, we shall at least exhibit him in a light in which he has not hitherto been regarded. Happily, the evidence on which this will rest, is indisputable: it is drawn from his own domestic letters.

  His reputation as a wit must rest, in the present day, chiefly upon productions which have long since been condemned as unreadable. Strange to say, when not under the influence of wine, he was a constant student of classical authors, perhaps the worst reading for a man of his tendencies: all that was satirical and impure attracting him most. Boileau, among French writers, and Cowley among the English, were his favorite authors. He also read many books of physic; for long before thirty his constitution was so broken by his life, that he turned his attention to remedies, and to medical treatment; and it is remarkable how many men of dissolute lives take up the same sort of reading, in the vain hope of repairing a course of dissolute living. As a writer, his style was at once forcible and lively; as a companion, he was wildly vivacious: madly, perilously, did he outrage decency, insult virtue, profane religion.

  His manners were those of a lawless and wretched mountebank; his delight was to haunt the stews, to debauch women, to write filthy songs and lewd pamphlets; he spent his time between scandal with the maids of honour, broils with men of letters, the receiving of insults, the giving of blows. By way of playing the gallant, he eloped with his wife before he married her. To make a display of scepticism, he ended by declining a duel, and gained the name of a coward. For five years together he was said to be drunk. The spirit within him failing of a worthy outlet, plunged him into adventures more befitting a clown. Once with the Duke of Buckingham he rented an inn on the Newmarket road, and turned innkeeper, supplying the husbands with drink and defiling their wives. He introduced himself, disguised as an old woman, into the house of a miser, robbed him of his wife, and passed her on to Buckingham. The husband hanged himself; they made very merry over the affair. At another time he disguised himself as a chairman, then as a beggar, and paid court to the guttergirls. He ended by turning charlatan, astrologer, and vendor of drugs for procuring abortion, in the suburbs…. One cannot copy even the titles of his poems; they were written only for the haunts of vice.

  Dorimant, the witty aristocratic rake in Etherege’s play of “The Man of Mode,” represents the Earl of Rochester.

  To the same court belonged Rochester, his great, fine wig covering a great, fine brain; he writing harmonious verses about—“Nothing”—or worse than nothing; and at the last wheedling Bishop Burnet into the belief that he had changed his courses, and that if he might rise from that ugly deathbed where the good-natured, pompous bishop sought him, he would be enrolled among the moralists. I think it was lucky that he died with such good impulse flashing at the top of his badnesses.

General

  He was … thoroughly acquainted with the classic authors, both Greek and Latin; a thing very rare (if not peculiar to him) among those of his quality.

  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.

  Lord Rochester’s poems have much more obscenity than wit, more wit than poetry, more poetry than politeness.

  The very name of Rochester is offensive to modest ears; yet does his poetry discover such energy of style and such poignancy, as give ground to imagine what so fine a genius, had he fallen in a more happy age and had followed better models, was capable of producing. The ancient satirists often use great liberties in their expressions; but their freedom no more resembles the licentiousness of Rochester, than the nakedness of an Indian does that of a common prostitute.

  There is an immense strength and pregnancy of expression in some of the best of his compositions, careless and unfinished as they are.

  The volumes which continued to be reprinted for nearly a century under the title of Rochester’s Poems form a kind of “Parnasse Satyrique” into which a modern reader can scarcely venture to dip. Of this notorious collection a large part was spurious; the offensive matter that had to be removed from the writings of Dorset, Buckinghamshire, Butler, and other less famous profligate poets, found an asylum under the infamy of the name of Rochester. But readers who are fortunate enough to secure the volume edited by the dead poet’s friends in 1691 will find no more indiscretions than are familiar in all poetry of the Restoration, and will discover, what they will not find elsewhere, the exquisite lyrics on which the fame of Rochester should rest. His satires, as trenchant and vigorous as they are foul, are not included in this edition; he uses the English language in them as Poggio and Filelfo had used Latin…. With Rochester the power of writing songs died in England until the age of Blake and Burns. He was the last of the cavalier lyrists, and in some respects the best. In the qualities that a song demands, simplicity, brevity, pathos and tenderness, he arrives nearer to pure excellence than any one between Carew and Burns. His style is without adornment, and, save in this one matter of song-writing, he is weighed down by the dryness and inefficiency of his age.

  Victims of vanity and lechery are seldom worth regret: but this hapless pupil of the Puritans, hounded as he was by false shame and foolish emulation into such inconceivable eccentricities of literary and personal debauchery, was born for so different a fate and so different a record, had not his evil star intervened to thwart it, that no one who realizes what he might and should have been can ever think of the poet or the man without a thrill or a pang of pity. The gallant young volunteer who distinguished himself even among English sailors and soldiers as the hero of a sea fight drank himself into cowardice, and truckled to a challenger as a Russo-Radical of our own day would tuckle to any enemy who might assist him in the degradation of this country: the noble and thoughtful poet who might have beaten all competitors out of the field became such a rhymester as Plato might have excepted from the sentence of expulsion—surely in other cases a superfluous sentence—pronounced against poets who might find themselves within the limits of a republic from which Platonic love had excluded the superfluous and obsolete influence of woman.

  Rochester had as sprightly a lyric gift as any writer of the Restoration. As a satirist he showed much insight and vigour, and, according to Aubrey, Marvell regarded him as the best satirist of his time. But he was something of a plagiarist. His “Satire against Mankind” owes much to Boileau, and to Cowley his lyrics were often deeply indebted.