80
SATIRES UPON THE JESUITS.
prologue.[1]
FOR who can longer hold? when every press,
The bar and pulpit too, has broke the peace?
When every scribbling fool at the alarms
Has drawn his pen, and rises up in arms?
And not a dull pretender of the town,
But vents his gall in pamphlet up and down?
When all with licence rail, and who will not,
Must be almost suspected of the plot,[2]
And bring his zeal or else his parts in doubt?
In vain our preaching tribe attack the foes,
In vain their weak artillery oppose;
- ↑ Oldham tells us that he designed this prologue ’in imitation of Persius, who has prefixed somewhat by that name before his book of Satires;' and that he drew the first Satire from that of Sylla's ghost in Ben Jonson's tragedy of Catiline. It will be admitted that he kept close to his original in the accumulation of horrors.
- ↑ The popish plot was disclosed to the King in August, 1678, and from that time till the dissolution of parliament in the following January it kept the country in a state of consternation. The agitation was renewed by the elections, and so great was the terror Of popery inspired by the revelations of Tonge, Oates, and the rest, that the candidates who were supported by the influence of the court were everywhere defeated. At this election, it is said, the practice of splitting freeholders for the purpose of multiplying votes was adopted for the first time. When parliament met again in March 1679, articles of impeachment were exhibited by the Commons against the Roman Catholic peers; and the King, in the hope of pacifying the hostility of the opposition, dismissed his chief adviser, Danby, and formed a new council with a strong infusion of protestant zeal in it. This device was regarded in most quarters as a juggle, and detestation of the Roman Catholics, especially of the Jesuits, broke out with greater fury than ever. It was at this moment Oldham published his Satires. Their appearance was opportune, and they were read with avidity. The pamphleteers alluded to in the prologue, who deluged the town with violent and ribald tracts, merely addressed themselves to the temporary passions of the occasion; while Oldham assailed the whole system of the Jesuits with a fearlessness of invective scarcely paralleled in the language. He had the field to himself. Dryden had not yet come to the rescue of the King, and two years elapsed before the publication of Absalom and Achitophel. In the meanwhile the Satires still continued to sell, and a third edition was called for in 1685.
