Poetical Works of John Oldham/Memoir
JOHN OLDHAM.
1653–1683.
Some student, curious in the lore of old book-stalls, may chance to have lighted upon a stout little volume of poems, printed in the seventeenth century, and bearing the name of John Oldham. Unless he happened to be familiar with the history of the period, he might never have heard the name before, and would, probably, conclude that Oldham was one of the swarm of scurrilous doggrel-mongers who abounded in those days of literary anarchy and licentiousness, and who, like other ephemera, perished as soon as they were born. The inference would be natural enough. Nearly a hundred years have elapsed since the publication of the last edition of these poems; and in the interval they have gone down into oblivion. To the present generation of readers they are almost unknown. Yet they obtained considerable celebrity in the lifetime of the author, and present legitimate claims to a place in every complete collection of English poetry. As a satirist, Oldham possesses incontestable merits of a high order. His subjects, like those of all writers who have lashed the vices of their day, are for the most part temporary; but the spirit, point, and freedom of the treatment inspires them with permanent interest. His Satires throw a flood of light on the politics, morals, and manners of the Restoration, and are everywhere marked by the broad hand of vigorous and original genius. Nor is this his greatest excellence. Throughout the whole of his writings he displays a courage and independence which honourably distinguish him in an age of corruption and servile adulation; and the few incidents of his life with which we are acquainted bear practical testimony to that love of liberty, and scorn of the slavery of patronage, which are energetically asserted in his poems. By the force of these qualities he won his reputation, and rose from a position of obscurity to the companionship of men of rank and letters, and the intimate friendship of Dryden.
John Oldham was the son of a nonconformist minister who had a congregation at Nuneaton. He was born at Shipton, near Tedbury, in Gloucestershire, on the 9th August, 1653; and, after having received the rudiments of his education at home, was placed at Tedbury school, where he remained for two years. He was indebted for this step in his preliminary career to an alderman of Bristol, who had a son at the school, and was anxious that the boy should have the advantage of reading with young Oldham — from which it may be inferred that the latter had already shown more than average diligence and capacity. Oldham made a rapid progress at Tedbury; and in June, 1670, was entered at Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was assisted in his studies by the Rev. Mr. Stephens, who early discovered the tendency of his genius. Here he soon distinguished himself by his mastery of Greek and Latin. His favourite authors were the poets, and the success with which he cultivated them is shown in his subsequent translations and imitations. The love of poetry manifested itself strongly at this period, and at last took complete possession of his time and thoughts. Later in life, when opportunities were thrown open to him of embarking in more profitable pursuits, he confessed that his efforts in every other direction were fruitless, and that the Muse, his 'darling sin,' still drew him back to the inveterate habit of his youth:
In vain I better studies there would sow;
Oft have I tried, but none will thrive or grow.
In May, 1674, he took his degree of B.A.; shortly after which, much against his own wishes and remonstrances, he was summoned home by his father, who, probably, could not afford the expense of a more prolonged residence at the University. No definite scheme of life appears to have been marked out for him; and to a mind impatient of idleness and dependence, the short time he remained in Gloucestershire, especially if his sketch of an 'ugly old priest' may be accepted as a sample of the people by whom he was surrounded,[1] must have been intolerably irksome. In the following year, the small-pox, so frequently the subject of poetical lamentations, carried off his close companion, Mr. Richard Morwent, and Oldham expressed his grief at the loss of his friend in a Pindaric Ode, which displays much tenderness of feeling and variety of illustration. This is the only poem he is known to have written during that interval; but it is not unlikely that he found ample employment in planning some of the longer poems he afterwards produced. To this period may, probably, be assigned the germs of the Satires against the Jesuits. Living in a society of nonconformists, he was at least in a position to hear religious and sectarian topics discussed with zeal and bitterness, and may have been, to some extent, led to the consideration of the subject by surrounding influences. But the intercourse with these people was, in other respects, dreary and uncongenial, and he was glad to make his escape from them when a prospect of settling in the neighbourhood of London was offered to him, although connected with a drudgery he disliked. The situation, that of usher at the free school of Croydon, in Surrey, was not very tempting. The stipend was trifling, and the labour monotonous and oppressive. But it possessed the greatest of all attractions for Oldham, because, inconsiderable as it was, it secured occupation and independence.
The duties of this employment, involving meaner responsibilities than those of tuition, left him little time for poetry; he made, notwithstanding, so profitable a use of his scanty leisure that he produced several pieces, some of which, obtaining circulation in MS., found their way into the literary coteries, and rendered their unknown author an object of curiosity to the town wits and critics. Oldham, shut up in his school-room, entirely unconscious of the sensation he had created in the great world of Fops'-alley and the coffee-houses, was one day surprised, in the midst of his tasks, by a visit from Rochester, Sedley, and Dorset, accompanied by other persons of celebrity, into whose hands his verses had fallen. Mr. Shepherd, the worthy master of the school, seeing Lord Rochester's card, and thinking it quite impossible that such a mark of distinction could be intended for his obscure assistant, took the whole credit of the compliment to himself, and, after carefully arranging his toilet, went to receive his visitors. The scene that followed might have been put into one of Shadwell's comedies. The old gentleman had prepared a speech for the occasion, expressing his high sense of the honour conferred upon him, and modestly deprecating his claims to so extraordinary a condescension; when Lord Dorset good-naturedly interposed, and informed him that the motive of the visit was to see his usher. By this time Mr. Shepherd had got into a little confusion in his speech, and was probably not unwilling to make his retreat, confessing, frankly enough, that he had neither the wit nor learning to qualify him for such fine company. How it fared with the poet when he was summoned to their presence is not related. But no immediate consequences followed the visit. It was Oldham’s first experience of courtiers and patronage, and his manner of receiving his visitors may not have been calculated to propitiate their favour. It is certain, at least, that whatever impression he made upon them, they left him in the situation in which they found him, and that he still continued to drudge at a toil from which his taste revolted, and which yielded him scarcely a bare subsistence. In one of his Satires, evidently alluding to his own case, he deplores the position of a man who is thus compelled to 'beat Greek and Latin for his life,' and whose rewards are inferior to those of a dancing-master:—
But who would be to the vile drudgery bound
Where there so small encouragement is found?
Where you for recompense of all your pains
Shall hardly reach a common fiddler's gains?
For when you've toiled, and laboured all you can,
To dung and cultivate a barren brain,
A dancing master shall be better paid,
Though he instructs the heels, and you the head.
This thankless occupation was relieved by the secret work in which he delighted; and if the unexpected recognition of his talents had no other effect, it seems at all events to have stimulated him to more constant and systematic efforts. He tells us that he could not resist the infatuation of making verses; and that even when he said his prayers, he could scarcely refrain from turning them into rhyme.
After he had passed three years at Croydon, he was fortunate enough, in 1678, to obtain the appointment of tutor to the two grandsons of Sir Edward Thurland, a judge, residing in the neighbourhood of Reigate. This situation was procured for him through the interest of his friend, Mr. Harman Atwood, a barrister, whose death he afterwards lamented in an elaborate ode. It was during this period he composed those famous invectives against the Jesuits, which, appearing at a moment when the discovery of the Popish plot predisposed the public to receive such writings with avidity, at once established his reputation. Oldham remained in Judge Thurland's family till 1680; and afterwards became tutor for a short time to the son of Sir William Hicks, who lived nearer to London. At this gentleman's house he formed an aquaintance with Dr. Richard Lower, a physician and medical writer, celebrated amongst his contemporaries by a controversy in which he was engaged on the theory of the transfusion of the blood.[2] Lower appears to have infected Oldham with his enthusiasm, and to have induced him to devote his unoccupied hours to the study of medicine, which, with the caprice of a new passion, he followed sedulously for a whole year, and then abandoned to return to his first love.
At the close of Oldham's engagement, Sir William Hicks proposed that he should accompany his son on his travels into Italy. But, eager to test his powers in a different arena, Oldham declined the offer. The success of his poems made him anxious to escape from the bondage of tuition; and his literary ambition naturally led him to settle in London. Here Rochester, Sedley, and the rest renewed their acquaintance with him; and through their introduction he became personally known to Dryden, who discerned in him a genius kindred to his own. A close and warm friendship grew up between them. Dryden was bringing out his Religio Laici, and his opinions had not yet undergone that change which might have placed an insuperable barrier between him and the author of the Satires on the Jesuits.
Oldham was now in the midst of that brilliant society which, fixing its centre at Will's Coffee-house, radiated to all the points of dissipation and gaiety in the metropolis. It was a scene of novel excitement to one whose life had hitherto been passed in retirement and wearisome routine; but its attractions were soon exhausted. The social moralist was not to be bribed or corrupted by these dangerous pleasures, and he saw in the profligacies of the town only fresh subjects for indignant satire. Had he been disposed to minister to the vanity and vices of the fashionable world, the seductions that were thrown in his way were sufficiently numerous and flattering. Admitted to a familiar intercourse with many distinguished persons, he was particularly noticed by the Earl of Kingston. That nobleman pressed him to accept the office of private chaplain to his household, which promised a more secure provision for the future than could be hoped for from the precarious profession of authorship; but Oldham preferred his liberty, with all its risks and hardships. His proud and manly nature resented the degradation to which clergymen in such situations were subjected; who for
Diet, a horse, and thirty pounds a year,
were treated more like menials than gentlemen. In his Satire addressed to a friend about to leave the University (published after this offer had been made to him), he draws a striking picture of the humiliations and indignities heaped upon the unhappy private chaplain, who, after many years of servitude in a noble family, might consider himself fortunate to be preferred to some slender benefice, on condition of his marrying his lady's cast-off waiting-woman. The sketch is curious as an illustration of the domestic life of the period.
The Earl of Kingston, finding he could not prevail upon Oldham to enter his house as a dependent, invited him as a guest on a visit to his seat at Holmes-Pierpont, in Nottinghamshire. Oldham accepted the invitation, and was received with a kindness and consideration as creditable to his lordship as to the poor struggling poet who had so honourably vindicated the dignity of his calling. About this time Oldham published a volume of poems and translations, in the advertisement to which he took occasion to assert his independence of the kind of patronage which, in those days, reduced the profession of literature to a level with the livery of the servants' hall. This volume, contrary to the prevailing custom, but like every other work published by Oldham, appeared without the name of a patron. Not content with merely discountenancing the practice, he could not resist the opportunity of exposing the system of egotism and servility which was countenanced by the example of the most celebrated authors. He promises his readers that, should his book ever reach another edition, it shall come out with all due pomp of venality and affectation: 'By that time belike the author means to have ready a very sparkish dedication, if he can but get himself known to some great man that will give a good parcel of guineas for being handsomely flattered. Then likewise the reader (for his farther comfort) may expect to see him appear with all the pomp and trappings of an author; his head in the front very finely cut, together with the year of his age, commendatory verses in abundance, and all the hands of the poets of quorum to confirm his book, and pass it for authentic. This at present is content to come abroad naked, undedicated, and unprefaced, without one kind word to shelter it from censure; and so let the critics take it amongst them.'
Oldham had not long enjoyed the seclusion and hospitalities of Holmes-Pierpont, when he was seized by an attack of small-pox, which terminated in his death on the 9th December, 1683, in the thirtieth year of his age. His life closed in the lap of luxuries that presented a strange contrast to the obscurity in which the greater part of it had been passed; and the honours paid to his memory may be accepted without suspicion as evidence of the respect in which he was held, since no man certainly ever took less pains to cultivate favour or flattery. The Earl of Kingston attended as chief mourner at his funeral, and afterwards erected a monument over his grave. When his Remains were collected and published in 1687, they were accompanied by tributes to his memory from Dryden, Flatman, Tom D'Urfey, Gould, and others. Testimonies of this description are generally of little value; but Dryden's lines on this occasion form a remarkable exception in the strict justice of their sentiments, and the reality of their pathos.
The notices that have been preserved of Oldham's personal appearance describe him as having the aspect of a student and a close observer. He was tall and slender, with disagreeable features, a long face, a prominent nose, and a sarcastic expression in his eyes. His constitution betrayed symptoms of consumption; and we gather from numerous passages in his works that the life of London was less congenial to his tastes and habits than the repose and elastic air of the country. Granger says that he was of a very different turn from his father, and that he appears to have been no enemy to the fashionable vices; but this assertion should be received with caution in reference to a writer who literally made a crusade against the licentiousness of the town. If he fell into the excesses of the company with which he mixed during the short term of his residence in London, there is no doubt that he speedily abandoned and renounced them.[3]
We have it on Spence’s authority that Pope considered Oldham a very indelicate writer, admitting, at the same time, that he had strong rage, but that it was too like Billingsgate. The criticism is true; but it is not the whole truth. There were elements better and nobler than Billingsgate in Oldham—masculine vigour, learning, variety and fitness of diction, and a sententious strength which Pope entirely overlooked. Dryden esteemed him as a satirist nearer to his own standard than any other writer of his time; a panegyric sustained by the opinion of Mr. Hallam, who says that 'Oldham, far superior in his satires to Marvell, ranks perhaps next to Dryden.' The affecting lines in which Dryden deplores the loss of the young poet, and indicates the prominent features of his character, leave, indeed, little more to be added by others:—
Farewell, too little and too lately known,
Whom I began to think and call my own;
For sure our souls were near allied, and thine
Cast in the same poetic mould as mine.
One common note on either lyre did strike,
And knaves and fools we both abhorred alike;
To the same goal did both our studies drive,
The last set out the soonest did arrive:
Thus Nisus fell upon the slippery place,
While his young friend performed and won the race.
O early ripe! to thy abundant store
What could advancing age have added more?
It might (what nature never gives the young)
Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue;
But satire needs not these, and wit will shine
Through the harsh cadence of a rugged line:
A noble error, and but seldom made,
When poets are by too much force betrayed.
Thy generous fruits, though gathered ere their time,
Still showed a quickness; and maturing time
But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme.
Once more, hail and farewell: Farewell, thou young,
But ah! too short, Marcellus of our tongue;
Thy brows with ivy and with laurels bound;
But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.
In the energy and volume of his writings, Oldham closely resembles Dryden. This resemblance, it should be observed, is exempt from a suspicion of imitation, as Oldham really preceded Dryden in the pieces in which it exists, the Satires on the Jesuits having been written two years before the appearance of Absalom and Achitophel, the first of Dryden's satires. Even were it otherwise, his vehemence betrays a temperament too eager of utterance to wait upon the study of models. Whatever is in him, therefore, of excellence or failure, has at least the merit of unimpeachable originality. The ruggedness of his versification—evidence alike of carelessness in art, and of the rude strength that resists restraints—did not escape the friendly criticism of Dryden, who excuses it under the plea that Satire does not need the refinements of skilfully-balanced numbers. Another apology for these pieces may be found in the nature of their subjects, and the disposition of the times to which they were addressed. Their boldness secured them immediate audience, and their ruggedness gave them a rougher edge, like that of a jagged hatchet that mangles its victims. But Oldham's indifference to the structure of his lines appears chiefly in the Satires where he is carried away by the impetuosity of his feelings. In two or three of his minor pieces he shows himself capable of a more melodious treatment.[4] It must be confessed, however, that the title bestowed upon him by Dryden of the 'young Marcellus of our tongue,' whatever he might have done to have earned it had he lived, less happily expressed his characteristics than that by which he was better known—the 'English Juvenal;' an appellation which is justified no less by the power and severity of his strictures, than by their animated portraiture of contemporary life and manners. In this latter point of view, his poems possess an obvious historical value.
During Oldham's life his Satires were received with great favour, and several times reprinted[5] A third edition of the Satires on the Jesuits was published in 1685; and in 1686 his works were collected in a single volume by the publisher who had previously issued them separately. In 1710 they reached a seventh edition; and were republished in two volumes in 1722. The last edition, edited by Captain Edward Thompson, appeared in 1770.[6] They have never been included in any general collection of the English Poets; being denied admission as a whole, no doubt very properly, in consequence of the coarseness objected to by Pope. It might be expected, nevertheless, that Oldham would have been recognised in the Anthologies, which, composed of picked specimens, afforded the means of bringing the public acquainted with him without compromising the taste of readers or editors. Yet here also he has been passed over in silence. If the principle of exclusion had been consistently acted upon in all instances, there would be less reason to complain of his rejection; but it is not easy to understand by what rule of taste or morality he was refused place in collections that presented the public with the obscenities of Swift in full, suffering not a scrap to escape; nor is that fastidiousness very intelligible which saw no objection to confer on such men as Rochester, whose lives and writings were saturated with grossness, a distinction denied to a poet who dragged their delinquencies before the bar of public opinion.[7]
It must be admitted that Oldham wrote some pieces which deserve the obloquy they have incurred, and that there are expressions and allusions in his Satires which would be unpardonable in a writer of the nineteenth century. In this respect, however, he is not more open to censure than the most famous of his contemporaries: and, although such transgressions are not to be excused by examples, it would be obviously unjust to hold up to particular condemnation in him a corrupt taste which has not excluded the works of Dryden from general circulation. Indeed, making a reasonable allowance for the common language and usages of the period, Oldham is entitled to credit, not only for having written so little that is offensive in this way, but for the general tendency of his writings in an opposite direction. The end he had in view should be taken into account in forming an estimate of the means he employed. If he descended to coarseness it was not to stimulate a prurient or depraved appetite, but to turn against vice its own weapons. The licentiousness of the age, the servility of pandering authors, the neglect of literature, the pride and profligacy of the nobility, and the degradation of the lower orders of the clergy, are the topics upon which he gives free scope to his honest satire; and he knew that if he treated them with delicacy and reserve he must inevitably fail in making the impression he desired. He was too much in earnest to pick and choose his phrases, or trim his versification. He thought only of the matter, and was indifferent to the manner. As he has himself frankly acknowledged, the indignation is everywhere paramount to the art:—
Nor needs there art or genius here to use,
Where indignation can create a muse.
The rank Oldham may be considered entitled to hold amongst English satirists must not be determined by a critical examination of the quality of his verse. He is not one of those writers who advanced the art of poetry, or whose example stimulated its cultivation. He abounds in faults of negligence, and wilful violations of metrical laws. Content with the condensed force he threw at the first heat into his lines, he took no further trouble about their structure. He was as indifferent to accuracy in his rhymes as to melody in his versification; and wounds the sensitive ear no less by such discords as ’give' and ’unbelief,' ’long' and 'gone,’ than by the irregularity of his rhythm. His language, always nervous, and well suited to his purpose by its idiomatic freedom, is never governed in the selection by any consideration of euphony or purity of taste; and, giving way to the overwhelming rage that is the prevailing characteristic of his Satires, he frequently repeats the same terms of objurgation and obloquy, which might have been easily varied by the exercise of a calmer judgment. These faults lie upon the surface. They strike the most careless reader; who soon, however, begins to perceive that they are the faults of an impetuous temperament, and not of ignorance or incapacity, and that Oldham's merits must be estimated by a very different test.
Of all the fugitive writers on the Protestant side who contributed to foment the agitation produced by the revelations of Titus Oates, Oldham is the ablest and boldest. He is not merely the most honest representative of the spirit that actuated his party, at a period when the kingdom was convulsed by religious feuds, but the only one whose works, addressed to the passions of the hour, are worth reproduction. He belongs wholly to the terrible episode of the Popish Plot. The entire term of his literary life did not spread over more than four or five years; and throughout that time the public mind was absorbed by the topics upon which he has dilated with such zealous frenzy in his attack on the Jesuits. As Dryden, a little later, expoused, the interests of the Duke of York's adherents, so Oldham asserted the views of their opponents; and in this aspect his Satires possess a special interest, and supply an important desideratum. They exhibit at its height the fury that pervaded the Protestant party, and enable us to balance the account of violence between them and the Roman Catholics. The writings of Dryden have transmitted to posterity an impression, too hastily adopted by modern historians, that the Tories immeasurably transcended the Whigs in malignity and intemperance; but in the invectives of Oldham we find a display of bitterness and rancour which even Dryden himself has not surpassed. The advantage of superior skill was with the greater poet; but Oldham rivals him in the breadth and torrent of his vituperation.
Nor are these Satires less curious as a picture of living manners. They reflect with minute fidelity the life of the Restoration. In his sketches of the modes and habits of London, Oldham enters into a variety of particulars that bear upon the moral and social attributes of the time. The panorama he thus brings before us is full of illustrative details. From the incidents of the streets, the slightness of the house architecture, the frequency of fires, the insecurity of passengers by night and day, and the exploits of scourers, roarers, and padders, he ascends to the delinquencies of the higher orders, the corruptions at court, the venality of authors and parasites, the neglect of literature, and the servile homage that was paid to wealth. The vividness of his portraiture of the contemporary age, and the stern justice he executes upon its vices, invest his Satires with a lasting historical value that abundantly compensates for the ruggedness of his verse, and vindicates his right to a high place amongst English satirists.
- ↑ This satire, entitled Character of a certain ugly old Priest, is in prose, and was written in 1676, two years after Oldham returned home. It is so offensively coarse that there is some difficulty in believing the traditional story that he designed it as a portrait of his father. Its exaggerations of personal ugliness are grotesque and preposterous, and look more like a hideous conception of the writer's fancy than a picture drawn from real life. The priest is described as a solecism in nature, with a foul skin, a yawning mouth, and a monstrous nose; a gruff voice that has preached half his parish deaf; a prodigious skull that would furnish a whole regiment of round-heads; and a pair of ears of a length so inordinate that he binds them over his crown at night instead of quilt night-caps. Had Oldham meant to gibbet his father in this outrageous caricature, he would, in all probability, have touched upon some of the points of temper or disposition which may be presumed to have provoked so graceless a satire; but there is not a single allusion throughout the whole that warrants such a supposition
- ↑ Lower, in his Tractatus de Corde, item de motu et colore Sanguinis, et Chyli in eum transitu, published in 1669, maintained the doctrine of the transfusion of blood from the vessels of one living animal to those of another, which he had experimentally demonstrated at Oxford in 1665, and afterwards upon an insane person before the Royal Society. He claimed the merit of the discovery, which was disputed by Francis Potter, a native of Wiltshire, but which really belonged to neither of them, having been pointed out half a century before in a work published at Frankfort by Libavius, a German physician and chemist. The faculty took a great interest in the discussion, and it ended in the explosion of a theory found to be practically attended with the most pernicious consequences. Lower enjoyed a high reputation in his profession, and was considered one of the ablest physicians of his time. Unfortunately, he laboured under the disadvantage of being a Whig, and when the Popish plot was discovered, he got into discredit with the Court party, and lost the greater part of his practice.
- ↑ A letter of Oldham's, preserved in the Bodleian Library, and quoted in the last edition of Croker's Boswell, sufficiently confirms this statement. It is addressed to one of his companions, and runs thus:— ’Thou knowest, Jack, there never was a more unconcerned coxcomb than myself once; but experience and thinking have made me quit that humour. I think virtue and sobriety (bow much so ever the men of wit may turn ’em into ridicule) the only measures to be happy, and believe the feast of a good conscience the best treat that can make a true epicure. I find I retain all the briskness, airiness, and gaiety I had, but purged from the dross and lees of debauchery; and am as merry as ever, though not so mad.’ This passage acquires additional f6rce from the fact that Oldham died at an age when most men give unrestrained indulgence to their love of pleasure, nor are there wanting other evidences of the serious change that passed over his spirit after his brief experience of the dissipations of London. Amongst his Miscellaneous Remains there is a paper written on the near prospect of death, in which the deep impressions made upon his mind are earnestly expressed. In this penitential meditation, Oldham reproaches himself with the transgressions of the past; but the language of contrition employed on such occasions must not be taken at its literal value. In moments of self-confession and religious reflection, men usually exaggerate their former errors and omissions; and when Oldham alludes to his excesses and neglects, we may reasonably conclude that he magnifies them. As this paper is not only interesting in itself as a pendant to the sketch of Oldham's character, but probably contains the last lines he wrote, it is inserted in full at the end of the volume.
- ↑ Oldham was not insensible to the charge of metrical harshness, and in one of his prefaces he defends himself on the ground that he was more occupied with the argument than the vehicle. 'I confess,' he says, 'I did not so much mind the cadence as the sense and expressiveness of my words, and therefore chose not those which were best disposed for placing themselves in rhyme, but rather the most keen and taunt, as being the most suitable to my argument. And certainly no one that pretends to distinguish the several colours of poetry would expect that Juvenal, when he is lashing vice and villany, should flow so smoothly as Ovid or Tibullus, when they are describing amours and gallantries, and have nothing to disturb and ruffle the evenness of their style.' This vindication of his ruggedness reveals one of his most conspicuous merits—his choice of language, which is at once familiar and striking, and everywhere the faithful representative of impulsive ardour and strong convictions.
- ↑ Oldham had some admirers who considered him entitled to take rank amongst the first poets in the language. Winstanley says of him that he was 'the delight of the muses, and glory of these last times; a man utterly unknown to me, but only by works, which none can read but with wonder and admiration; so pithy his strains, so sententious his expressions, so elegant his oratory, so reviving his language, so smooth his lines, in translation outdoing the original, and in invention matchless.' Winstanley's critical opinion, it is scarcely necessary to say after this indiscriminate panegyric, is not worth much, but it indicates how highly Oldham was esteemed in some quarters by his contemporaries.
- ↑ Thompson, whose critical pretensions brought upon him the merciless ridicule of his critics, also edited the works of Marvell and Paul Whitehead. He belonged to the maritime service, and appears to have resorted to literature as a pis aller when the peace of 1762 threw him out of employment. His first venture was a licentious poem called the Meretriciad, in which he celebrated the most notorious women of the town; this was followed by the Courtezan and the Demirep, the subjects of which may be inferred from their titles. He also published a sort of rambling account of his own life, called Sailors' Letters. In his professional capacity he acquired a more creditable reputation, and was considered a man of ability and courage. As a writer, the best things he produced were some sea-songs, excellent in their kind. 'The topsails shiver in the wind,' and a few others, still retain their popularity.
- ↑ Amongst Oldham's poems there is a lamentation on the death of Rochester, imitated from a Greek pastoral, and conceived in the usual vein of extravagant panegyric. Rochester was the first man of rank or influence that noticed Oldham, who in these stanzas discharges the obligations he owed to his memory. No personal considerations for Rochester, however, restrained him during the lifetime of that distinguished profligate from exposing the vices he practised, or the social delinquencies of the order to which he belonged. Pope has instituted a comparison between Oldham, Dorset, and Rochester, as poets, which curiously exemplifies the special character of his own taste. Rochester, he says, had much more delicacy and knowledge of mankind than Oldham, and was the medium between him and Dorset, who was better than either. The regularity of Dorset, and the wit of Rochester, were, as might be expected, preferred by Pope to the rough energy of Oldham.