caused Lord Rochester to observe, that "he wondered to see a man have so good a memory as to repeat the same story without losing the least circumstance, and yet not remember that he had told it to the same persons the very day before."[1]
He was undisturbed by libels; enjoying the severities of Wilmot, enduring and not resenting the bitter personalities of Sheffield.[2] To have been angry about such matters had been a trouble; he therefore let them alone, banishing Wilmot only for a time for a libel which he had given him on himself, and rewarding Sheffield for a satire unsurpassed for boldness in an age of lampoons. He was compared to Nero, who sung while Rome was burning, and pardoned the malice of the wit in the satire of the comparison. He loved a laugh at court as much as Nokes or Tony Leigh did upon the stage.
Yet he would laugh at his best friends, and be
Just as good company as Nokes or Leigh.[3]
Few indeed escaped his wit, and rather than not laugh he would turn the laugh upon himself.
- ↑ Burnet, i. 458, ed. 1823.
- ↑ Lord Rochester to Saville relative to Mulgrave's Essay on Satire. (Malone's Life of Dryden, p. 134.) See also Burnet, i. 433, ed. 1823.
- ↑ Mulgrave's "Essay on Satire." Mr. Bolton Corney in vol, iii. p. 162, of Notes and Queries, has in a most unanswerable manner vindicated Mulgrave's claim to the authorship of this satire.
