Samuel Pordage

Samuel Pordage (1633 – c. 1691) was a 17th-century English poet. He is best known by his Azaria and Hushai (1682), a reply to John Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel.

Samuel was the eldest son of John Pordage, a clergyman from Bradfield in Berkshire, by his first wife, and was baptised at St Dionis Backchurch, London, on 29 December 1633. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School from 1644, and studied law at Lincoln's Inn. At the trial of his father ten years later he appears to have been one of the witnesses. In his title-pages he described himself as ‘of Lincoln's Inn’ and ‘a student of physick.’ He was at one time chief steward to Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke.

Roger L'Estrange attacked Pordage in the ‘Observator’ for 5 April 1682 on account of ‘A brief History of all the Papists' bloudy Persecutions,’ calling him ‘limping Pordage, a son of the famous Familist about Reading and the author of several libels,’ one against L'Estrange. Dryden, in the second part of ‘Absalom and Achitophel,’ published in November, described Pordage as

Lame Mephibosheth, the wizard's son.

He made various translations, wrote poems, and laid claim to two tragedies, Herod and Mariamne (1673), and The Siege of Babylon (1678), and a romance, Eliana.

While living with his father at the parsonage of Bradfield in 1660 he published a translation from Seneca the Younger, with notes, called ‘Troades Englished.’ About the same time he published ‘Poems upon Several Occasions, by S. P., gent.,’ a little volume which included panegyrics on Charles II and General George Monck, but which consisted for the most part of poems in the style of Robert Herrick.

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