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Rochester
the Moralizing Satirist |
Satyr
has lost its art, its sting is gone,
The Fop and Cully now may be undone;
That dear instructing Rage is no allay’d,
And
no sharp Pen does tell ’em how they’ve stray’d. |
|
Aphra
Behn, 1680 |
 Sure
there has not lived in many ages (if ever) so extraordinary,
and, I think I may add, so useful a person as most Englishmen
know my Lord to have been, whether we consider the constant good
sense and the agreeable mirth of his ordinary conversation or
the vast reach and compass of his invention and the wonderful
depths of his retired thoughts, the uncommon graces of his
fashion or the inimitable turns of his wit, the becoming
gentleness, the bewitching softness of his civility or the force
and fitness of his satire; for as he was both the delight and
wonder of men, the love and the dotage of women, so he was a
continual curb to impertinence and the public censor of folly. |
|
Robert
Wolsey, Preface to Valentinian: a Tragedy. As 'tis Altered by
the late Earl of Rochester and Acted at the Theatre Royal,
1685. |
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