Restoration Comedy 1660-1720 (Paperback)

RESTORATION CARNIVAL RESTORATION CARNIVAL Five Courtier Poets Rochester Dorset Sedley Etherege Sheffield VIVIAN DE SOLA PINTO The Folio Society London Contents PREFACE page 7 INTRODUCTION 9 I SIR CHARLES SEDLEY 27 His selected poems 45 II SIR GEORGE ETHEREGE 71 His selected poems 91 III CHARLES SACKVILLE, EARL OF DORSET 109 His selected poems 128 IV JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER 149 His selected poems 183 V JOHN SHEFFIELD, DUKE OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE 213 His selected poems 23 1 EPILOGUE 247 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 INDEX OF FIRST LINES 254 when Night Darkens the Streets then wander forth the Sons Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine. MILTON, Paradise Lost, I, 500-502 Then our Age was in ifs Prime, Free from Rage, and free from Crime, A very Merry, Dancing, Drinking, Laughing, Quaffing, and unthinking Time. JOHN DRYDEN, The Secular Masque, 1700 Lord, what would they say Should their Catullus walk that way W. B. YEATS, The Scholars Preface When Pope in his Epistle to Augustus wrote of the Wits of either Charless days, The Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more, Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies oer . . . he was looking back to the last age in England when poetry still formed an essential part of the life of a courtier and when a court still produced verses as a matter of course. It is true that he does not distinguish between the wits of the reigns of Charles I and of Charles II. In our own time Dr F. R. Leavis has made some very acute observations on the differences between the wits of the period before the troubles with their old rich court culture and the wits of the Restoration Court No doubt he is right in his contention that much of that finecourt culture failed to survive the interregnum and that in a very real sense the poetry of the Restoration Court repre sents, to use his own expression, the decay of the Caroline courtly tradition. Still the poetry of the Restoration wits is the last body of English verse which was produced by a court, which, with all its shortcomings, still regarded itself not merely as a fashionable club but as an ideal community embodying certain qualities of grace and fine living and which was also in touch with a genuine popular culture of the street and the tavern. A last faint pathetic echo of that alliance can be heard in the pale and vapid songs, long out of date, about Chloe, and Phyllis, and Strephon sung by Old Mr Nandy in Dickens s Little Dorrit 1 Revaluation 1936, p. 34. 8 . Preface The poetry of the Restoration wits has not hitherto been easily accessible, and it therefore seems desirable that a repre sentative selection of it should be presented to the public as the work of a group in a setting of the lives of some of the chief courtier-poets. The work of scholars in England and America has done much in recent years to clear up the thick veil of gossip scandal and synthetic romance which has shrouded the lives and reputations of these men for two centuries. It is time that use was made of this work to present them to the public, not, indeed, as major writers, but as a group with considerable his torical significance, and the authors of a body of verse of permanent value, worthy to be studied beside the best comedies of the period and the c Diary of Samuel Pepys as an expression of an extremely interesting phase of English culture. The texts of the poems presented in this collectionreproduce the spelling, capitalisation and punctuation of the original editions, except for the correction of obvious misprints and the substitution of the modern V for the old long . In the few poems printed from contemporary MSS the abbreviations have been expanded as they would have been in contemporary editions...