Sir William Petty, the London Coffee Houses, and the Restoration ‘Leonine’
| Autor: | Harold Love |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2007 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Seventeenth Century. 22:381-394 |
| ISSN: | 2050-4616 0268-117X |
| DOI: | 10.1080/0268117x.2007.10555600 |
| Popis: | The eminence as neo-Latin epigrammists of John Owen, Thomas Campion, Sir John Stradling and Charles Fitzgeoffrey has made them essential to any comprehensive understanding of literary satire in the early-seventeenth century.1 Through their use of an international language, they may well have reached a larger readership than most other verse written in Britain at that time. Yet, for the Restoration period, neo-Latin satire seems to be regarded by most present-day scholars as an insignificant pastime of dons and eruditi. University burlesque orations in the 'Terrae filius' tradition were quite widely circulated in manuscript and Richard Braithwaite's Barnabae Itinerarium (London, 1636) still has readers, at least for the engaging English parallel text added in 1638, but Henry Bold's Latine Songs with their English and Poems (London, 1685) was found of so little interest that the LION archive omits the Latin entirely, retaining only the English parallel versions, many of which are not by Bold.2 Insofar as any serious scholarly attention is now given to post-Owen neo-Latin verse satire, it is to the occasional efforts in quantitative metres of poets who were also prominent in the vernacular, and even this interest peters out after 1660. The reason is that no major poet in English during the half-century following Milton, Cowley and Marvell has left a substantial body of Latin verse. Dryden contributed only minor examples and Rochester's one student effort was probably ghosted.3 Anthony Alsop and Vincent Bourne in the eighteenth century were not significant writers in their native language.Yet study of the contents of the manuscript anthologies and personal miscellanies that are our principal sources for Restoration clandestine satire suggests that Latin satirical verse continued to be collected and written not only by dons but by university educated state functionaries, and that its exchange was a significant means by which friendships and alliances were maintained at court, in the law, in the church, and in parliament. Henry Bold, a Chancery official, is himself an example. The personal miscellanies of the courtier Sir William Haward, the Cambridge don John Watson, and the Non-conformist baronet, Sir John Pye, discussed in my English Clandestine Satire 1660-1702, all contain a good representation of neo-Latin verse of a predominantly social nature.4 The more widely circulated examples listed in the first-line index published with that study are mostly epigrams, partly of native and partly foreign origin.5 The most copied foreign items arise from entries written for a competition sponsored by Louis XIV for a distich to be inscribed over the entrance to the Louvre colonnade brought to completion by Perrault in 1671. The winning entry, by George Gordon, fourth Marquis of Huntly and later Duke of Gordon, circulated in the form:Non orbis gentem non urbem gens habet ullaUrbsve domum Dominum vel domus ulla parem.6[The world has no comparable people, no people such a city, no city such a palace, nor any palace such a master.]This soon attracted a motley appendix of other entries, additional poems praising Louis XIV, and Latin and English parodies and responses, which crop up in varying combinations. Marvell and Rochester both contri buted to this corpus. Marvell has left us six entries for the prize, grouped as 'Inscribenda Luparae'.7 Rochester's contribution was an English version of a Latin response to a distich praising the rapidity of Louis' conquests in the campaigns of 1670-72:You Lorraine stole; by fraud you gott Burgundy,And Holland bought by God you'l pay for't one day.8Accumulations of Luparan satire are to be found in Bodleian MS Additional B 106, fols 7v-9r and Bodleian Library, MS Smith 27, pp. 47-48a, and lesser ones in British Library Additional MS 18,220, fols 74r, 91r; Bodleian MS Sancroft 18, p. 4; and Bodleian MS Rawl. poet. 69, fol. 57. A second continental current transmitted anti-Papal epigrams originally posted on the statues of Pasquin and Marforio in Rome. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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