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Abstract The thesis represents the most extensive study yet made of the life and works of one of the most neglected authors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In its introduction it provides a review of King's critical reception up to the present day, beginning with the comments of some of the Scriblerians and his eighteenth-century editors and biographers. The thesis proper is divided into two sections, the first of which is concerned with King's life and opinions, and is in turn separated into two chapters. Chapter One is a biography, and not only establishes the facts of King's life, but seeks to place him firmly in his historical and ideological context. The conclusion drawn from this is that King remained committed to the high Anglican{fory ideology of rank and authority throughout his life, and that these values had a major bearing on everything he did and wrote. The second chapter looks in more detail at King's cultural milieu and the relationship between his ideological standpoint and his views on learning, particularly in terms of the ideal of the 'gentleman scholar'. The second half of the chapter is devoted to a reconsideration of the relationship between science and Humanism and the high Anglican attitude towards Baconianism, which is aimed at dispelling the common notion that King's thee-political conservatism necessarily led him to oppose science per se. A close study of his serious, non-ironic writings, most notably the Heathen Gods and the Adversaria (a loose collection of observations which to date have been neglected) confirms that King was both a disciple of late Renaissance Christian Humanism and an advocate of the 'high' Baconianism associated with the Anglican Church. The second part deals with King's work as a Menippean satirist, and begins with a definition and review of the chief classical and Renaissance exponents of this ancient genre (sometimes known as 'the tradition of learned wit'), before turning to the analysis of a number of King's prosimetric and poetic parodies, travesties and mock-heroics. Chapter Four looks at King's controversial writings and political pamphlets, concentrating on his use of irony and burlesque as weapons against a number of thee-political enemies. The last three chapters are devoted respectively to King's finest works - his satires on Richard Bentley, Martin Lister, and Hans Sloane - and again consider these pieces in terms of the adaptation of the Menippean genre for the purposes of elaborate parody and occasional satire. At the same time, the meaning of King's parodies is shown to extend beyond merely personal attack to a serio-comic defence of traditional values in respect of scholarship, literature and more broadly social issues. By their exceptionally witty ridicule of abuses of philological and scientific learning, they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) endorse the intellectual and cultural ideals of late Renaissance Humanism and high Baconianism. The final contention is that while his burlesques are seriously limited by their topicality, they are sufficiently sophisticated and amusing to entitle him to an important place in the tradition of Menippean satire. The thesis also contains four appendices dealing with King's involvement in The Examiner, the question of his authorship of A Vindication of the Reverend Dr Henry Sacheverell, some unpublished manuscripts attributed to him, and a manuscript of a nineteenth-century essay on his life and works. 'The Ingenious Dr. King': The Life and Works of Dr William King (1663-1712), with Particular Reference to the Tradition of Menippean Satire David G. En gel Ph.D University of Edinburgh 1989 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Part One: The Life and Opinions of William King, Gentleman 1. Life 23 2. 'In the hands of a Gentleman': King and the Ideology of Proper and Polite Learning 59 Part Two: William King as a Menippean Satirist. 3. 'The Varronian kind' 100 4. 'Sometimes a Silly Academic': The Controversial Tracts and Pamphlets 170 5. 'Under the Pretext of Criticism': The Satires on Richard Bentley 201 6. 'A Dish not so very common': The Satires on Martin Lister 232 7. 'Experimental Philosophy in a manner laid aside': The Satires on Hans Sloane 261 Conclusion 309 Appendices: A. King and The Examiner 314 B. The Authorship of A Vindication of the Reverend Dr Henry Sacheverell 316 C. Some Unpublished Manuscripts and King's Dedicatory Poem to Ned Ward's version of Don Quixote 319 D. The Commemoration Essay of George Marshal! 322 Bibliography 323 Reference List 348 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the University of Edinburgh for awarding me a University of Edinburgh Studentship, and the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals for their grant under the Overseas Research Students Award Scheme, without which this thesis would not have been possible. I am also grateful to Assoc. Professor Mary Chan, Dr Bruce Johnson, Dr Richard Madelaine, and the other staff members of the University of New South Wales, and Dr Roger Savage, for their kind advice and encouragement during the course of my studies in Sydney and Edinburgh. To my supervisor, Dr Michael Phillips, I owe a considerable debt, both for his general advice as to the direction of this study, and in particular for his invaluable assistance in the preparation of the final draft. I wish to give special thanks to my parents, Graham and Joyce Engel, and to Wouter and Wilhelmina van Rijckevorsel, for their generous support over the years. Above all, I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my fiancee, Madeleine van Rijckevorsel, for her matchless patience and tolerance, loving encouragement, and desperately needed supply of 'lekkere blikjes bier'. I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. 1 Introduction Dr William King, it has recently been observed, 'is one of a very small number of English authors who, buried in undeserved obscurity, merit full resurrection'.! By birth a gentleman, by profession a civil lawyer and judge, and. by faith a devout high churchman, he was by inclination a poet, a satirist, and above all, a humorist. His erudition and learning, extraordinary even by the standards of his day, were matched only by his love of good living, especially good wine. These ingredients, as well as liberal measures of irony and the odd pinch of genuine originality, have long been recognized as the basic elements of his relatively small but miscellaneous collection of writings. As Harry Solomon remarks, King's 'robust originality invigorated several comic genres at the beginning of the eighteenth century', and it is certainly 'one of the injustices of literary history that King has been almost totally obscured by blooms of which his works were the bud'. It is my intention in this study to rectify this situation and provide the most extensive account to date of the life and works of one of the period's most interesting and gifted minor writers. Not surprisingly it was Swift who first recognized some of the most important characteristics of King's writing, ironically in response to an attack the latter made in 1704 on The Tale of a Tub . Swift's comments were made some years later, by which time the two men had no doubt already become personally acquainted. Only a few months earlier, in a letter to Ambrose Phillips, he had bothered to mention that King's Miscellanies had just been published, which prompts one to assume that the author was held in some regard by the two correspondents.2 It is also significant that even in the face of King's provocation, Swift's assessment of his work as a whole is not entirely dismissive. He acknowledges that his assailant 'upon some Occasions hath discover'd 2 no ill Vein of Humor'; but, he continues with typical irony, 'Tis a Pity any Occasions should put him under a necessity of being so hasty in his Productions, which otherwise might be entertaining'.3 Swift suggests, therefore, that King possessed many of the qualities essential for the writing of witty and humorous literature similar to his own: those he lacked were dedication, discretion, and care. A narrow sort of brilliance and a lazy facility were also the qualities of King's personality and writing identified by John Gay and Alexander Pope. In The Present State of Wit, Gay sums up in a sentence both the contemporary response to King's writings and that of many critics since; Dr King, he notes, 'has a World of Wit, yet it lies in one particular Way of Raillery'. 4 Pope, it seems, was less impressed. In a letter to Burlington four years after King's death he facetiously recalls the reflection of Bernard Lin tot that 'Dr King would write verses in a tavern three hours after he couldn't speak'. 5 The fact that King is bracketed with his friend William Oldisworth (whose translations of Horace's Odes and Epodes were more remarkable for their rapidity than quality) and the infamous Sir Richard Blackmore speaks volumes.