"Partial to some one side": The advice-to-a-painter poem as historical writing

Abstract

This essay argues that many Restoration and eighteenth-century satires and panegyrics were intended and received as interventions in a tradition of English historical writing. Using the advice-to-a-painter poems of Edmund Waller and Andrew Marvell as my chief examples, I suggest that the partiality derogatorily ascribed to satire and panegyric by Restoration historians not only enabled satirists and panegyrists to adopt a biased political stance; it also facilitated a narrowing of formal perspective - partiality in the sense of partialness - that allowed for the development of more detailed forms of historical representation. © 2011 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.