Rochester was the model for a number of rake heroes in plays of the period, such as Don John in Thomas Shadwell's The Libertine (1675) and Dorimant in George Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676).[3] Meanwhile he was eulogised by his contemporaries such as Aphra Behn and Andrew Marvell, who described him as "the only man in England that had the true vein of satire".[40] Daniel Defoe quoted him in Moll Flanders, and discussed him in other works.[41] Voltaire, who spoke of Rochester as "the man of genius, the great poet", admired his satire for its "energy and fire" and translated some lines into French to "display the shining imagination his lordship only could boast".[42]
By the 1750s, Rochester's reputation suffered as the liberality of the Restoration era subsided; Samuel Johnson characterised him as a worthless and dissolute rake.[43] Horace Walpole described him as "a man whom the muses were fond to inspire but ashamed to avow".[44] Despite this general disdain for Rochester, William Hazlitt commented that his "verses cut and sparkle like diamonds"[45] while his "epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written".[46] Referring to Rochester's perspective, Hazlitt wrote that "his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity".[46] Meanwhile, Goethe quoted A Satyr against Reason and Mankind in English in his Autobiography.[47] Despite this, Rochester's work was largely ignored throughout the Victorian era.
Rochester's reputation would not begin to revive until the 1920s. Ezra Pound, in his ABC of Reading, compared Rochester's poetry favourably to better-known figures such as Alexander Pope and John Milton.[48] Graham Greene characterised Rochester as a "spoiled Puritan".[49] Although F. R. Leavis argued that "Rochester is not a great poet of any kind", William Empson admired him. More recently, Germaine Greer has questioned the validity of the appraisal of Rochester as a drunken rake, and hailed the sensitivity of some of his lyrics.[50]
Rochester was listed #6 in Time Out's "Top 30 chart of London's most erotic writers". Tom Morris, the associate director, of the National Theatre said, "Rochester reminds me of an unhinged poacher, moving noiselessly through the night and shooting every convention that moves. Bishop Burnett, who coached him to an implausible death-bed repentance, said that he was unable to express any feeling without oaths and obscenities. He seemed like a punk in a frock coat. But once the straw dolls have been slain, Rochester celebrates in a sexual landscape all of his own."[51]
