University of Virginia Library

The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford, 1984), p. 186.

Edited texts of the poem without any record of variants will be found in The complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven, 1968), pp. 54-59 and John Harold Wilson, Court Satires of the Restoration (Columbus, 1976), pp. 14-22. Walker's critical edition suspends its apparatus for this item.

Described in W. J. Cameron, "A late Restoration Scriptorium," Renaissance and modern studies 7 (1963), 25-52.

Letters addressed from London to Sir Joseph Williamson while Plenipotentiary at the Congress of Cologne in the years 1673 and 1674, ed. W. D. Christie. Camden Society publications, new ser., 8-9 (London, 1874), ii, 132.

See Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714. Volume 5: 1688-1697, ed. W. J. Cameron (New Haven, 1971), p. 532.

E.g. Np42's concurrence in A-version readings at ll. 63 and 68.

Cameron, POAS, v, 19. See also pp. 537-538.

Following l. 80, the OSe15 scribe got as far as writing l. 85, the first of the following stanza, and then had to scrape it out before inscribing the correct line.

Wilson, p. 14, cites the epilogue to The Mistaken Husband (1675): "What will not poor forsaken women try? | When man's not near, the Signior must supply."

For variants of both tendencies see Title (assuming 1678 is a mistake for 1673), and ll. 17, 26, 27, 30 ("Harris"), 43, 44, 51, 53, 62 and 67. Few of these are of the kind to carry much textual weight; however, 43 "least" and 53 "Moll" certainly suggest at least a memorial influence from an extra-scriptorial source.

Note in this respect the affectionate letters from Dorset and Buckingham reprinted in The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford, 1980), pp. 51-52, 60-62, 145-149 and 151-155, and their inclusion among the list of close friends in the concluding lines of "An Allusion to Horace" (circa 1675).

Lincolnshire Archives Office MS Anc 15/B/4, p. 20.

I wish to thank Joan McKeown, Dianne Heriot and Meredith Sherlock for their assistance in preparing and checking this list.

The references are to Np42 and BLh19 respectively.

This note seems to have been intended for 1.6, where "Her" is underlined.

The speaker is the Duchess of Portsmouth whose apartments were at the end of the Long Gallery at the Palace of Whitehall. The fumbler is the king—this being the only reference to him in any version of the poem.

This stanza has the same victim as ll. 69-72. The OSe15 annotator has positioned it to follow that stanza.

The "Harrys" variant shared by BLh19 and Od8/1 is likely to be the original reading, the reference apparently being to an occasion on which Rochester's friend, Henry Savile, had attempted to rape the countess (Letters, pp. 68-69). "Harris" is found only in texts descended from the scriptorium master copy.

Actually her mother.

The sex confusion is repeated in V90.

There was no military or naval officer named "Bartrow," which should be given consideration as the lectio difficilior. If it is not simply a mistake for "cazzo" (Italian for penis), the context would suggest an allusion to Charles II under his Civil-war pseudonym "Barlow".