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发布时间：2006-07-08 20:20     点击：

    EVEN to his contemporaries, Rochester was a legendary figure. One of the youngest and most handsome courtiers of the restored Charles II, he was the favorite of a king whose wit, lasciviousness and serious intellectual interests he shared. He was banished from court several times, but Charles's pleasure in his conversation always resulted in his recall. His authentic adventures included the attempted abduction of an heiress (whom he later married), smashing a phallic-shaped sundial in the royal gardens during a drunken spree, and a violent affray with the watch at Epsom in which one of his companions was killed.

    Quite apart from his reputation as a poet, he was feted in the writings of his friends, notably in Sir George Etherege's comedy, "The Man of Mode". Just before he died in 1680, at the age of 33, destroyed by alcoholism and syphilis, Rochester's legend took a surprising turn. After a series of conversations with an Anglican rationalist divine, Gilbert Burnet, the skeptical libertine made a death-bed conversion which was celebrated in the devotional literature of the succeeding century.

    Engaging as it is, the Rochester legend has always been a distraction. It has resulted in many apocryphal stories and dubious attributions, and it can still divert attention from the poetry. It is Rochester's achievement as a poet which commands our interest and makes him something more than a luridly colorful period figure. For all the brevity of his career, Rochester is a crucial figure in the development of English verse satire and the Horatian epistle, a student of his elder French contemporary Boileau, and an important exemplar for later poets as different as Alexander Pope and Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea.

21. Rochester was not

A.a troublemaker.

B.a fictional legendary figure.

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