"Partial to Some One Side": The Advice-to-a-Painter Poem as Historical Writing

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.