The young man of twenty four who went off to join Monmouth's forces had already published, in 1685, _Poems on Several Occasions. With a Pastoral. To Which is Added, A Discourse of Life_. In the preface, writing like a fashionable man-about-town, Tutchin describes the lyrics, translations, and satires of this volume as "trifles" which he had let circulate and had now secured "by promising to Print them." The book shows the variety in poetic kinds that one would expect in a young writer who had been drinking deeply of Lord Rochester, Waller, Cowley, the Earl of Roscommon, Oldham, and Dryden. Juvenalian satires reminiscent of Oldham are neatly balanced by memorial verses to Oldham and Rochester, late metaphysical lyrics ("And why in red dost thou appear"), classical dialogues ("Cleopatra to Anthony"), translations of Horace, and the well-turned "autobiographical" couplets of "A Letter to A Friend." In its variety and themes, _Poems on Several Occasions_ resembles Oldham's _Works_, which was published twice in 1684. Tutchin's "The Tory Catch," like Oldham's "A Dithyrambick. A Drunkard's Speech in a Mask," has a speaker who ironically brags of the social misconduct which the author satirizes. "A Letter to a Friend" is a skillfully exaggerated account of the attractions and dangers in rhyming. Although perhaps autobiographical in part, the poem also imitates the long-standing tradition derived from Horace's first Epistle of Book I, and revived most recently in Oldham's "A Letter from the Country to a Friend in Town."[13] Both "The Tory Catch" and "A Letter to a Friend" are reprinted here from _Poems on Several Occasions_. Tutchin's first book shows two impulses: the awkwardly lyrical and the directly satiric. He feels compelled, in the Preface, to defend his choice of less serious subjects. His light poems do not, "in the least, detract from _Virtue_; since I have Read the _Poems_ of _Beza_, _Heinsius_, our own _Donne_, _&c._" He promises to turn to "some Graver Subject." There are other equally significant comments in a Preface that reveals a great deal about changing literary taste. In "To the Memory of Mr. John Oldham," Tutchin curiously avoids the main subject of Dryden's finer elegy, namely, Oldham's achievement in rough satire. His praise is that "_Crashaw_ and _Cowley_ both did live in thee." However, in his "Satyr Against Vice" and "Satyr Against Whoring," Tutchin has already learned the art of declaiming, from the poet who has been called "the English Juvenal," John Oldham.