My Lord All-Pride

 

My Lord All-Pride

by John Wilmot, 2d Earl of Rochester

 

Bursting with Pride, the loath'd Imposthume swells,
Prick him, he sheds his Venom strait, and smells;
But 'tis so Lewd a Scribler, that he writes
With as much force to Nature, as he fights.
Harden'd in shame, 'tis such a Baffled Fop,
That ev'ry School-Boy whips him like a Top:
And with his Arme, and Head, his Brain's so weak
That his starv'd Fancy is compell'd to take,
Among the Excrements of others' Wit,
To make a stinking Meal of what they Shit.
Soe Swine, for nasty Meat, the Dunghill run,
And toss their gruntling Snowts up, when they've done:
Against his Stars, the Coxcomb ever strives,
And to be something they forbid, contrives.
With a Red Nose, Splay Foot, and Goggle Eye,
A Plough-Mans looby Meene, Face all awry,
With stinking Breathe, and ev'ry Loathsome mark,
The Punchianello sets up for a Spark.
With equal Self-conceit too, he bears Arms,
But with that vile success, his part performs,
That he Burlesques his Trade, and what is best
In others, turnes like Harlequin to Jeast.
So have I seene at Smithfields wondrous Fair,  

When all his Brother-Monsters flourish there,
A Lubbard Elephant divert the Town,
With makeing Legs, and shooting off a Gun.
Goe where he will, he never finds a Friend,
Shame, and derision, all his steps attend:
Alike abroad, at home, i'th' Camp, and Court,
This Knight o'th' Burning Pestle makes us sport.

 

 

 

 Note on the poem by V. de Sola Pinto:

 

 LXI My Lord All Pride:  1680, pp. 144, 145; Portland Miscellany. This poem is undoubtedly a satire on John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave (see Introduction, p. xxiii). It was printed in a broadside dated 1679 with no. XXXVI ["A very Heroical Epistle in Answer to Ephelia"] under the title 'Epigram on My lord All-Pride' (Roxburghe Ballads, ed. J. W. Ebsworth, IV, 3, 567). 

18 Punchianello] Punchinello or Polichinello was the hero of a seventeenth-century Italian puppet show, the prototype of Punch, which appeared in London soon after the Restoration. Pepys saw 'Polichinello at Moorfields on 22nd August 1666. See O.E.D., s.a. Punchinello.

26 Lubbard] obsolete form of 'lubber'—a big, clumsy, stupid fellow, a lout (O.E.D.). 

30 Knight, o' th' Burning Pestle]An allusion to Beaumont and Fletcher's well-known burlesque. The name is doubless applied to Sheffield because of his red nose.

 

From Poems by John Wilmot Earl of Rochester. Ed. with an introduction and notes by Vivian de Sola Pinto. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. 2nd ed. (Muses' Library). 1964.

 

From the Introduction, pp. xxii-xxiii:

 

It was during the fourteen or fifteen years that he spent at Court that Rochester acquired the reputation for wickedness that hung round him like a sulphurous halo in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He seems to have made an enemy of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave (afterwards Duke of Buckinghamshire), in the late sixteen-sixties. Sheffield was one of the minor Court Wits, a humourless, rather pompous person, not without literary talent, but with an immense opinion of his own importance. He became the friend and patron of Dryden and later of Pope and appears to be one of the chief sources of Rochester's evil reputation. The quarrel between the two men came to a head in November 1669, and Rochester has commonly been accused of cowardice for refusing to fight a duel with 'My Lord All Pride', as he called Sheffield. This was the version of the story given by Mulgrave himself in his memoirs (1), but entries in the Journals of the House of Lords (2) show that the duel was actually stopped by the personal intervnetion of the King, at whose request the House sent the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod to secure the persons of both the ppers. Both of them were brought before the House, and made to promise to keep the peace. These entries seem to prove that there is no foundation for the charte of cowardice brought against Rochester on this occasion. When he judged that fighting was necessary, he was quite willing to fight; on 25th March 1673 a duel between him and Lord Dunbar, a notorious bully, was narrowly averted by the Earl-Marshal's intervention, and in December, 1674, when Mulgrave challenged Henry Savile, Rochester offred to act as second to his friend.

(1) The Works of John Sheffield (London, 1723) ii, 9, 10.

(2) Journals of the House of Lords, vol. xii (1666-75), pp. 272, 274, 2786, 277 s.d. 23rd, 24th, 26th Nov. 1669.

 

 

 

 

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