“Absurd and Foolish Philosophy”: Hobbes and Rochester

Abstract

When the reborn Waller made the penitent Rochester a talisman, he belatedly returned a compliment: Rochester had openly revealed his high regard for Waller, whose devotional phase and muted reciprocal gesture he did not live to see. In An Allusion to Horace 10 Sat: 1st Book (1680), Rochester proclaims Waller one who “In Panegyricks does excell Mankind.”¹ Dorimant, the hero of Etherege’s comedy The Man of Mode (1675), then and now thought to be based on Rochester, quotes Waller several times with evident relish.² As John Dennis records in A Defence of “Sir Fopling Flutter,” a Comedy (1722), the traditional identification of Dorimant reflects Rochester’s known habit of “repeating, on every Occasion, the Verses of Waller.”³ But according to Burnet, the satirically inclined Rochester “admired most” Nicolas Boileau and Cowley “among the French, and … English Wits”; and Aubrey relates how Waller maintained that “men write ill things well and good things ill; that satyricall writing was downehill, most easie and naturall; that at Billingsgate one might hear great heights of such witt; that the cursed earth naturally produces briars and thornes and weeds, but roses and fine flowers require cultivation.”⁴ “Panegyricks” and “satyricall writing” only meet as polar opposites.