Enough remains in the later editions, from which the worst matter is expunged, to warn any one not to enter upon a further perusal.
Rochester's life was consistent with his writings. Out of the abundance of his heart his mouth spoke. To apply to him the words in which Mr. Carlyle describes the Prince de Rohan, he was "a debauched, merely libidinous mortal, lying there quite helpless—dissolute (as we well say)." He used various disguises in carrying on his intrigues, assuming the appearance of a quack doctor, or any other character that his fertile imagination suggested. In this employment—politely called "intrigue," but for which I might use a more expressive name—he spent all his years from youth upwards. He died comparatively young; and no wonder: his constitution must have been impaired by his excesses. On his death-bed, and during the last days of his life, it appears that he expressed contrition for his errors to Burnet, who afterwards published an account of their conversations under the title of Some Passages of the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester. Johnson, being asked on one occasion whether a good life of Rochester had been written, replied, not perhaps without a latent meaning beyond that which appears on the surface,—"Why, sir, we have a good death, but there is no life."[1]
Some of the poems of Oldham, his contemporary, stand alone in their nastiness. Rochester had at least that last miserable remnant of decency which prompted him to indicate his foulest words by a dash, or by the initial and final letter: Oldham gives them in full. Such language is now happily confined to the oyster-women of Billinsgate—Oldham is their representative man.
I now come to Thomas, or—as he was familiarly called by his contemporaries—Tom D'Urfey. This individual managed,
- ↑ "A single chapter of Isaiah," says Professor Stanley, "made a penitent believer of the profligate Rochester,"—Lectures on the Eastern Church, Introd. iii. 76. Johnson has himself supplied, in his Lives of the Poets, the want of a concise biography of this nobleman.
