Page:Poetical Works of John Oldham.djvu/29

Rh The rank Oldham may be considered entitled to hold amongst English satirists must not be determined by a critical examination of the quality of his verse. He is not one of those writers who advanced the art of poetry, or whose example stimulated its cultivation. He abounds in faults of negligence, and wilful violations of metrical laws. Content with the condensed force he threw at the first heat into his lines, he took no further trouble about their structure. He was as indifferent to accuracy in his rhymes as to melody in his versification; and wounds the sensitive ear no less by such discords as ’give' and ’unbelief,' ’long' and 'gone,’ than by the irregularity of his rhythm. His language, always nervous, and well suited to his purpose by its idiomatic freedom, is never governed in the selection by any consideration of euphony or purity of taste; and, giving way to the overwhelming rage that is the prevailing characteristic of his Satires, he frequently repeats the same terms of objurgation and obloquy, which might have been easily varied by the exercise of a calmer judgment. These faults lie upon the surface. They strike the most careless reader; who soon, however, begins to perceive that they are the faults of an impetuous temperament, and not of ignorance or incapacity, and that Oldham's merits must be estimated by a very different test.

Of all the fugitive writers on the Protestant side who contributed to foment the agitation produced by the revelations of Titus Oates, Oldham is the ablest and boldest. He is not merely the most honest representative of the spirit that actuated his party, at a period when the kingdom was convulsed by religious feuds, but the only one whose works, addressed to the passions of the hour, are worth reproduction. He belongs wholly to the terrible episode of the Popish Plot. The entire term of his literary life did not spread over more than four or five years; and throughout that time the public mind was absorbed by the topics upon which he has dilated with such zealous frenzy in his attack on the Jesuits. As Dryden, a little later, expoused, the Rh