Dunton generously summed up the widely varied causes of "the loyal and ingenious _Tutchin_ (alias _Master Observator_); the bold Asserter of English Liberties; the scourge of the High-flyers; the Seaman's Advocate; the Detector of the Victualling-office; the scorn and terror of Fools and Knaves; the Nation's _Argus_, and the Queen's faithful Subject."[10] Even his death in Queen's Bench Prison, on September 23, 1707, was romanticized into another instance of martyrdom. "... _he liv'd and dy'd_," announced the Country-man of _The Observator_, "_for the Service of his Country_." Tutchin's followers dramatized his death as the result of a politically-inspired thrashing which "six ruffians" administered to him, in revenge for slanderous remarks made in _The Observator_ against Vice-Admiral Sir Thomas Dilkes.[11] The "_Pulchrum Est Pro Patria Mori_" portrait, reprinted here as the frontispiece, was circulated to attest to Tutchin's political martyrdom. However, as the autopsy-report demonstrates and as Muddiman rightly concludes, "Tutchin really died from a specific disease and not from the thrashing undergone seven months before his death."[12]
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_.