ABSTRACT
Date and publication. Spoken in July 1681, at the visit o f the King’s Company to Oxford for the annual Act. Printed in EP (1693).
The famed Italian Muse, whose rhymes advance Orlando, and the paladins of France, Records that when our wit and sense is flown, ’Tis lodged within the circle o f the moon
5 In earthen jars, which one who thither soared Set to his nose, snuffed up, and was restored. Whate’er the story be, the moral’s true: The wit we lost in town we find in you. Our poets their fled parts may draw from hence,
10 And fill their windy heads with sober sense. When London votes with Southwark’s disagree,
f65. 1-6 . Ariosto, Orlando Furioso xxxiv. D. echoes Harington’s translation (1591): Men’s wits are ‘layd up . . . in the circle o f the Moone’ (st. 72); Astolfo soared there, and finding the vessel containing his own wit, he ‘set the vessels mouth but to his nose, / And to his place he snuft up all his wit’ (st. 85). He then took the jar containing Orlando’s wit and put it to Orlando’s nostrils: ‘He drawing breath, this miracle was wrought: / . . . And he restored unto his perfect wit’ (xxxix 55). 1-2 . Echoes Drayton: ‘The Thuskan Poet doth advance, / The franticke Paladine o f France’ (Nymphidia 11. 193-4; W. B. Gardner), i i . In the February 1681 election London returned the same predominantly Whig members that it had sent to the two previous Parliaments, but South wark elected two Tory MPs, rejecting the Whig candidates Slingsby Bethel and Edward Smith. In May 1681 the Borough o f Southwark presented a petition to the King thanking him for dissolving Parliament (R. R. Sharpe, London and the Kingdom, 3 vols (1894-5) ii 463-6). The political contrast between London and Southwark is depicted by Robert Hearne in Obsequium et Veritas: or A Dialogue Between London and Southwark (1681), where ‘Veritas’ (Truth) scorns ‘popular Applause’ and claims to be ‘a good honest Southwark Borough, and I thank God, we love our King, and our Country; and our
Here they may find their long-lost loyalty. Here busy senates, to th’ old cause inclined, May snuff the votes their fellows left behind:
15 Your country neighbours, when their grain grows dear, May come and find their last provision here: Whereas we cannot much lament our loss, Who neither carried back, nor brought one cross; We looked what representatives would bring,
20 But they helf>ed us just as they did the King. Yet we despair not, for we now lay forth The Sibyl’s books to those who know their worth; And though the first was sacrificed before, These volumes doubly will the price restore.
