the one hand, he persisted in identifying himself with the former commonwealth, the Monmouth cause, the Revolution, the reform movement especially in the theater, and Whig liberty. He became noted for tactless exposés of high-level misconduct in his pamphlets and in The Observator (Apr. 1, 1702-Sept. 23, 1707). His detractors frequently paired him with Defoe as a monster or a villain. Again and again, he made himself obnoxious to important personages such as the Earl of Albemarle or the Duke of Marlborough.[8] On the other hand, his hatred for tyranny propelled him frequently into such extremes as his disgraceful complicity in William Fuller's impostures. In the years 1700-1704, he was generally reputed to be "Secretary to the abominal Society of King-Killers"—the secret Calves-Head Club made up of dissenters who met on January 30th, the anniversary of the death of Charles I, to sing prophane anthems.[9]

Dunton generously summed up the widely varied causes of "the loyal and ingenious Tutchin (alias Master Observator); the bold Asserter of English Liberties; the scourge of the High-flyers; the Seaman's Advocate; the Detector of the Victualling-office; the scorn and terror of Fools and Knaves; the Nation's Argus, and the Queen's faithful Subject."[10] Even his death in Queen's Bench Prison, on September 23, 1707, was romanticized into another instance of martyrdom. "... he liv'd and dy'd," announced the Country-man of The Observator, "for the Service of his Country." Tutchin's followers dramatized his death as the result of a politically-inspired thrashing which "six ruffians" administered to him, in revenge for slanderous remarks made in The Observator against Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Dilkes.[11] The "Pulchrum Est Pro Patria Mori" portrait, reprinted here as the frontispiece, was circulated to attest to Tutchin's political martyrdom. However, as the autopsy-report demonstrates and as Muddiman rightly concludes, "Tutchin really died from a specific disease and not from the thrashing undergone seven months before his death."[12]

The young man of twenty four who went off to join Monmouth's forces had already published, in 1685, Poems on Several Occasions. With a Pastoral. To Which is Added, A Discourse of Life. In the preface, writing like a fashionable man-about-town, Tutchin describes the lyrics, translations, and satires of this volume as "trifles" which he had let circulate and had now secured "by promising to Print them." The book shows the variety in poetic kinds that one would expect in a young writer who had been drinking deeply of Lord Rochester, Waller, Cowley, the Earl of Roscommon, Oldham, and Dryden. Juvenalian satires reminiscent of Oldham are neatly balanced by memorial verses to Oldham and Rochester, late metaphysical lyrics ("And why in red dost thou appear"), classical dialogues ("Cleopatra to Anthony"), translations of Horace, and the well-turned "autobiographical" couplets of "A Letter to A Friend." In its variety and themes, Poems on Several Occasions resembles Oldham's Works, which was published twice in 1684. Tutchin's "The Tory Catch," like Oldham's "A Dithyrambick. A Drunkard's Speech in a Mask," has a speaker who ironically brags of the social misconduct which the author satirizes. "A Letter to a Friend" is a skillfully exaggerated account of the attractions and dangers in rhyming. Although perhaps autobiographical in part, the poem also imitates the long-standing tradition derived from Horace's first Epistle of Book I, and revived most recently in Oldham's "A Letter from the Country to a Friend in Town."[13] Both "The Tory Catch" and "A Letter to a Friend" are reprinted here from Poems on Several Occasions.

Tutchin's first book shows two impulses: the awkwardly lyrical and the directly satiric. He feels compelled, in the Preface, to defend his choice of less serious subjects. His light poems do not, "in the least, detract from Virtue; since I have Read the Poems of Beza, Heinsius, our own Donne, &c." He promises to turn to "some Graver Subject." There are other equally significant comments in a Preface that reveals a great deal about changing literary taste. In "To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham," Tutchin curiously avoids the main subject of Dryden's finer elegy, namely, Oldham's achievement in rough satire. His praise is that "Crashaw and Cowley both did live in thee." However, in his "Satyr Against Vice" and "Satyr Against Whoring," Tutchin has already learned the art of declaiming, from the poet who has been called "the English Juvenal," John Oldham.

In the years between 1685 and 1707, Tutchin's separate poems were mainly occasional and satirical. Panegyric for William III dominates such an early piece as An Heroic Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty (1689), and hatred for the Stuarts possesses a later poem like The British Muse: or Tyranny Expos'd (1701). In Civitas Militaris (1690) Tutchin engages in city politics. The elegy on the death of Queen Mary irritated Defoe enough to have "T——n" placed among the "Pindarick Legions" in The Pacificator (1700). Two poems, however,—The Earth-quake of Jamaica (1692) and Whitehall in Flames (1698)—differ from the others in that they are Cowleyan "Pindaricks" moralizing on disasters. The Earth-quake of Jamaica is reprinted here to illustrate Tutchin's descriptive talent. He starts with an actual event, the Jamaican disaster of June 7, 1692; and then, as the epigraph on the title page suggests, he presents a variation on Horace's rejection of "senseless Epicureanism," in Ode 34 of Book I. The Earth-quake of Jamaica may have been worked over longer than was customary. It was published shortly before December 10, the manuscript date on Narcissus Luttrell's copy now in the Houghton Library. Some six months earlier, in the late morning of June 7, the earthquake had erupted in Port Royal, the "boom" port on the south side of the island. In three schocks lasting less than three minutes, the famed capital of the buccaneers had fallen. News of the disaster did not reach London until August 9. The earthquake then became one of the most widely discussed events. The London Gazette ran stories on it, scientists like Sir Hans Sloane published eye-witness accounts in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the moralists declared God's wrath had come upon the wickedest place in Christendom, and "the actors of the drolls" in Southwark Fair even mockingly re-enacted the event until the Lord Mayor put a stop to the performances.