¹ Walpole, Horace. "An Account, by the Honourable Horace Walpole, of the Writings of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester," Some Passages in the Life and Death of John Earl of Rochester, Gilbert Burnet. (London: W. Baynes and Son, 1820) 6
² The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968) xvii
³ For an excellent discussion of Rochester’s use of obscenity, please see Rogal, Samuel J. "Control of Honest Expression." Forum 30 (1989): 33-38.
⁴ Burnet 23
⁵ Greene 22
⁶ Vieth, Complete xviii
⁷ Greene 26
⁸ Greene 26
⁹ Greene 26
¹⁰ Burnet, 26
¹¹ Burnet 27
¹² Greene 67
¹³ Greene 86
¹⁴ Burnet 28
¹⁵ Greene 119
¹⁶ Greene 127
¹⁷ Greene 145
¹⁸ Greene 146
¹⁹ Vieth, Complete xii
²⁰ Greene 152
²¹ Greene 208
²² Jones, JR, ed. The Restored Monarchy 1660-1688. (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield: 1979). 11
²³ Ibid. 11
²⁴ Jones, JR Country and Court: England, 1658-1714. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press: 1978). 3
²⁵ Weber, Harold. The Restoration Rake-Hero (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1986).
²⁶ The Rochester-Saville Letters 1671-1680. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1941. 46.
²⁷ Vieth, David M, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: Rochester’s Poems of 1680 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press: 1963)
²⁸ Wilmot, John and Henry Saville. The Rochester-Saville Letters 1671-1680. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1841) 60.
²⁹ Burnet, 39
³⁰ Burnet, 37.
³¹ Griffin, Dustin H. Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) 32.
³² According to Vieth (Complete, 42), "law students at the Inns of Court tried to achieve sophistication by becoming amateur literary critics." I would suggest that here, the emphasis should be laid on "tried."
³³ Literally, a "foolish fire;" another name for a will-o-the-wisp.
³⁴ For an excellent discussion of this, please see Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, pp. 275-278.
³⁵ Pascal, Pensees. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1968) 47.
³⁶ For example, see Griffin, pp. 168-73.
³⁷ Cited in: Everett, Barbara. "The Sense of Nothing." Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Jeremy Treglown, Ed. 7-8.
³⁸ Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (New York: Collier Books, 1978). 100
³⁹ Ibid, 100.
⁴⁰ Ibid. 42, 59.
⁴¹ Rochester’s deathbed conversion is still debated today; while Burnet reports that Rochester rejected his former philosophies and attitudes and embraced the church, there is a possibility that the dying man was delirious, or had been pressured into it by sheer force of numbers – most of the people who saw him in his last months urged his conversion.
⁴² Lewis, Wyndham. "The Greatest Satire is Nonmoral," Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism. Ronald Paulson, Ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1971) 175.