Tutchin's aim is to compare vulnerable nature with vulnerable man: "Can humane Race / Stand on their / Legs when Nature Reels?" He sees in the disaster a challenge for English sinners to repent: the "Hurricane of Fate" wails on "murder'd _Cornish_." He had not yet forgotten the Monmouth adventure. For he alludes here to the act of Parliament passed in 1689 reversing the attainder of Henry Cornish, the alderman who had been brutally executed in 1685 for high treason through participating in the Rye House Plot and attaching himself to the Duke of Monmouth. For Tutchin, politics were always relevant. Tutchin's true forte is not the descriptive poem, but satire. Poems published in the years 1696 to 1705--from _A Pindarick Ode_ to _The Tackers_--exploit the satirical impulse that had been latent in _Poems on Several Occasions_. Increasingly he turns to general denunciation and thinly disguised lampoon. Of the two main Augustan traditions in satire--the "fine raillery" that Dryden perfected and the rough satire that reached back to Donne, Cleveland, and Oldham--Tutchin belongs to the latter. Defoe found him to be "so woundy touchy, and so willing to quarrel," and noted that "Want of Temper was his capital Error."[16] The specific circumstance that produced _A Pindarick Ode, in the Praise of Folly and Knavery_ (1696), reprinted here, is generally said to be his dismissal from the victualling office because he failed to establish his case that the commissioners mismanaged public funds. Such corruption in the administration would soon transform a deep admiration for William III into the disenchantment of _The Foreigners_ (1700). That Tutchin was uneasy in his effort to write satire in the mode of Dryden is suggested by his abandonment of irony after the first part of _A Pindarick Ode_. In his introductory verses, Benjamin Bridgwater accurately observes that Erasmus' _Ironia_ no longer suffices: This hard'ned Age do's rougher Means require, We must be _Cupp'd_ and _Cauteriz'd_ with _Fire_. Echoing Dryden's _Mac Flecknoe_, Tutchin invites Dullness and "Immortal _Nonsence_" to inspire his ironic praise of the folly and knavery that now ride roughshod over such traditional values as learning, love, wit, and patriotism. A few of the lines have the moving quality of Augustan satire at its best: Did e'er the old or new Philosophy, Make a Man splendid live, or wealthy die? The irony of _A Pindarick Ode_ does not adequately mask the denunciation. In Stanza X, it is even replaced by the antiquated Hero's diatribe against "our modern Knavish Arts"--never to return to the rest of the poem. Doubtless, the indictment of the "nefarious Brood at Home" that grows rich in wartime was the heart of the satire. Defoe hinted at this motive in the satirical vignette of Tutchin as Shamwhig, which appeared in the first edition of _The True-Born Englishman_ (1700):