AND OTHER LITERARY RAKES 23

enjoyed the privilege of being hanged with a silken
rope. One of the literary rakes to be noticed, Lord
Dorset, was so near to obtaining that privilege as
to be tried for murder.
It is as difficult for modem readers to enter into
these ghasdy pleasures of the seventeenth century,
as it is for people of refinement to understand the
intense enjoyment derived by the lower classes of our
own days from a death-bed, a ghastly accident, or a
corpse.
Objection may be taken both to the space and
to the insistence given in this chapter to material
and even disgusting subjects, before Rochester and
the other literary rakes have been so much as intro-
duced ; but it would be difficult to understand the
coarseness and want of refinement of those rhymsters
and playwrights without a due appreciation of the
roughness, if not the semi-barbarism of their sur-
roundings.
It may be replied that the surroundings of
Shakespeare and of Milton were as rough or
rougher. No doubt they were. To their sur-
roundings, however, those two poets were superior ;
their life's object and work was their art ; in their
persons, mind conquered matter. With the men
with whom we are about to deal it was otherwise.
Far from rising above their surroundings, Rochester
and his companions were essentially of the same
level : their lives' object and work was the gratifi-
cation of their carnal appetites ; their art, such as



01

1 Vf^p^



54 ROCHESTER

it was, merely served as a condiment to savour their
sensual enjoyments, and their mental pleasures were
always secondary and subservient to their material
self-indulgences.
