IN THIS passage Rochester recounts the experience of being accosted by an admirer who has come across an anonymous satire and recognized it as his by its style. Though Rochester denies authorship, the admirer refuses to believe him, and circulates the poem through the town with this erroneous attribution. It is a vivid example of the way poetry circulated in the period, and of the hazards of attribution, especially when a major name like Rochester's is speculatively attached to all manner of verses. Except that this is not Rochester speaking: it is the persona of Timon in a satire modelled on Boileau's adaptation of Horace, and so the voice is both a fictional Restoration voice and one which echoes the complaints of French and Roman poets. All too often editors and critics have assimilated the voice in Rochester's poems to that of the historical John Wilmot, regardless of the games which are played with voice and role right across his oeuvre. Moreover, this poem, though it appears in every twentieth-century edition of his work, may not even have been written by Rochester. As Harold Love explains:

So much for recognizing a poet by his style.