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Updated: May 16, 2025
The Restoration gave him back his already twice lost estates, which he again squandered by a life of wild extravagance and profligacy at Court. He was a member of the "Cabal" and intrigued against Clarendon. He wrote pamphlets, lampoons, and plays, but his chief contribution to literature was The Rehearsal, a comedy, in which he satirised the heroic drama of Dryden and others.
Alas for that age of pouff which he satirised with such a caustic pen! To what dismal end has it come! End of powder and petroleum, and instead of beauty, burning! The lonely wanderer, so sorely oppressed with cares and perplexities, looked wistfully up at those familiar windows. How often she had loitered away the twilight with Lady Laura, talking idly in that flower-laden balcony!
Yet Montague and Prior, who had keenly satirised Dryden, were introduced by Dorset into public life; and the best comedy of Dryden's mortal enemy, Shadwell, was written at Dorset's country seat. The munificent Earl might, if such had been his wish, have been the rival of those of whom he was content to be the benefactor.
Under the regency that followed, Voltaire got into trouble again and again through the sharpness of his pen, and at last, accused of verse that satirised the Regent, he was locked up on the 17th of May, 1717 in the Bastille. There he wrote the first two books of his Henriade, and finished a play on OEdipus, which he had begun at the age of eighteen.
The writing of Persius was that of a student who gathered the types he satirised from books rather than from life. Juvenal brought to his task not only a wide knowledge of the world or, at least, of the world of the capital but a singular power of mordant phrase, and a mastery over crude and vivid effect that keeps the reader suspended between disgust and admiration.
Another characteristic of Handel's for which his early biographers are hard put to find an excuse was his enormous appetite for food and drink, satirised by his once intimate friend the painter Goupy in a well-known print called "The Charming Brute," in which Handel is represented with the head of a pig, seated at an organ, with various comestibles disposed at his feet.
Defoe appeared several times afterwards in the character of a reformer of manners, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. When the retort was made that his own manners were not perfect, he denied that this invalidated the worth of his appeal, but at the same time challenged his accusers to prove him guilty of any of the vices that he had satirised.
Monks, as the name denotes, should live solitary; but they swarm in streets and alleys, and make a profitable trade of beggary, to the detriment of the roadside mendicants. They are full of vice and religious punctilios. Some of them will not touch a piece of money, but they "make no scruple of the sin of drunkenness and the lust of the flesh." Preachers are satirised likewise.
Splendid dinner-services might take the place of the old simple ware, and luxurious drapery and rugs covered the couches instead of the skins of animals, as in the old time. Vulgarity and ostentation, such as Horace satirised, were doubtless too often to be met with.
There is too much in the whole thing of that element which was satirised by an ironic interpretation of the epitaph "Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away." Wilkins Micawber.
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