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On which the observant man who fills a throne,
Declared the pigs were vastly like his own;
On which the brewer, swallowed up in joys,
Tears and astonishment in both his eyes,
His soul brimful of sentiments so loyal,

Exclaimed: O heavens! and can my swine
Be deemed by majesty so fine?

Heavens ! can my pigs compare, sire, with pigs royal?'
To which the king assented with a nod :

On which the brewer bowed, and said: 'Good God!'
Then winked significant on Miss,
Significant of wonder and of bliss,

Who, bridling in her chin divine,

Crossed her fair hands, a dear old maid,
And then her lowest curtsy made

For such high honour done her father's swine.

Now did his majesty, so gracious, say
To Mr Whitbread in his flying way:

'Whitbread, d'ye nick the exciseman now and then? Hae, Whitbread, when d' ye think to leave off trade? Hae? what? Miss Whitbread 's still a maid, a maid? What, what's the matter with the men?

'D'ye hunt?-hae hunt? No no, you are too old;
You 'ill be lord-mayor-lord-mayor one day;
Yes, yes, I've heard so; yes, yes, so I'm told;
Don't, don't the fine for sheriff pay;

I'll prick you every year, man, I declare;
Yes, Whitbread, yes, yes, you shall be lord-mayor.
'Whitbread, d' ye keep a coach, or job one, pray?
Job, job, that's cheapest; yes, that's best, that 's best.
You put your liveries on the draymen-hae?

Hae, Whitbread? You have feathered well your nest. What, what's the price now, hae, of all your stock? But, Whitbread, what 's o'clock, pray, what 's o'clock?'

Now Whitbread inward said: May I be curst
If I know what to answer first,'

Then searched his brains with ruminating eye;
But ere the man of malt an answer found,
Quick on his heel, lo, majesty turned round,
Skipped off, and balked the honour of reply. .

Lord Gregory.

'Ah ope, Lord Gregory, thy door,

A midnight wanderer sighs;

Hard rush the rains, the tempests roar,
And lightnings cleave the skies.'

'Who comes with woe at this drear night,

A pilgrim of the gloom?

If she whose love did once delight,
My cot shall yield her room.'

'Alas! thou heardst a pilgrim mourn
That once was prized by thee:
Think of the ring by yonder burn
Thou gav'st to love and me.

'But shouldst thou not poor Marion know, I'll turn my feet and part;

And think the storms that round me blow, Far kinder than thy heart.'

...

The editions of Wolcot's works-1788, 1792, 1794-96 (4 vols.), and 1812 (5 vols.)-are none of them quite complete. Some of the last of his seventy separate publications only appeared in 1814-17. Selections were published in 1824 and 1834. Many verses published under the name of 'Peter Pindar,' 'Peter Pindar, jun.,' &c. were not Wolcot's, but by various imitators.

William Gifford (1756-1826) was born at Ashburton in Devonshire. His father, a ne'er-dowell glazier, died of drink in 1767; his mother died a year afterwards; and after some little education, the boy was at thirteen placed on board a coasting-vessel by his godfather, a man supposed to have benefited himself at the expense of Gifford's parents. It will be easily conceived,' he recorded, 'that my life was a life of hardship. I was not only "a ship-boy on the high and giddy mast,” but also in the cabin, where every menial office fell to my lot; yet if I was restless and discontented, I can safely say it was not so much on account of this, as of my being precluded from all possibility of reading: as my master did not possess, nor do I recollect seeing, during the whole time of my abode with him, a single book of any description, except the Coasting Pilot! The cabinboy was often seen by the fishwives of his native town running about the beach in a ragged jacket and trousers, and thus their tale, often repeated, awakened Ashburton to pity for the orphan, as also to resentment against the man who had brought him so low. His godfather was concussed into taking him from the sea, and again he was put to school, where he made rapid progress, and soon hoped to succeed his old and infirm schoolmaster. But in 1772 his godfather, sure he had got learning enough, put him apprentice to a shoemaker; and this new profession Gifford hated with a perfect hatred. He had but one book in the world, and that was a treatise on algebra, a subject of which he had no knowledge; but meeting with Fenning's Introduction, he mastered both works. This was not done,' he remembered, without difficulty. I had not a farthing on earth, nor a friend to give me one pen, ink, and paper, therefore, were for the most part as completely out of my reach as a crown and sceptre. There was indeed a resource, but the utmost caution and secrecy were necessary in applying it. I beat out pieces of leather as smooth as possible, and wrought my problems on them with a blunted awl: for the rest, my memory was tenacious, and I could multiply and divide by it to a great extent.'

He next tried poetry, and some of his 'lamentable doggerel' fell into the hands of a surgeon of Ashburton, who raised money to buy him off from his apprenticeship; and in little more than two years Gifford had made such extraordinary progress in study that he was pronounced fit for Oxford. In 1779 a Bible clerkship was procured for him at Exeter College, and this, with occasional assistance from the country, enabled him to live till, in 1782, he took his B.A. He had been accustomed to correspond on literary subjects with a friend in London, his letters being enclosed in covers sent, to save postage, to Lord Grosvenor. The direc tion having been once inadvertently omitted, the franker, supposing the letter to be meant for himself, opened and read it. He was struck with the contents, and after seeing the writer, and hearing

his story, undertook his present support and future establishment; and meanwhile invited him to come and live with him. These,' the grateful scholar testified, 'were not words of course: they were more than fulfilled in every point. I did go and reside with him, and I experienced a warm and cordial reception, and a kind and affectionate esteem, that has known neither diminution nor interruption from that hour to this, a period of twenty years.' Part of this time was spent in attending his patron's son, Lord Belgrave, on a tour of Europe, which greatly informed the mind of the tutor. He appeared as author in 1794. His first production was a satirical poem, The Bavial, directed against a group of sentimental poetasters of that day, known from their hobbies as the Della Cruscan School-Mrs Piozzi, Mrs Robinson, Mr Greathead, Mr Merry, and some others (see page 473) --conspicuous for their affectation and bad taste, and their high-flown compliments to one another. 'There was a specious brilliancy in these exotics,' Gifford complained, which dazzled the native grubs, who had scarce ever ventured beyond a sheep, and a crook, and a rose-tree grove; with an ostentatious display of "blue hills," and "crashing torrents," and "petrifying suns."' Gifford's vigorous exposure of the 'splay-foot madrigals' and 'nambypamby madrigals of love,' in Scott's phrase, 'squabashed the Della Cruscans at one blow.' Anna Matilda, Laura Maria, Edwin, Orlando, and the other high-flown heralds of log-rolling sank into instant and irretrievable contempt. The satire, in the form of a conversation between the author, Persius, represented by P., and a friend, F., was universally read and admired; now it seems often unreasonably savage and unfair. But lines like these can hardly be described as wholly temporary or antiquated in application:

Degeneracy of Modern Literature.

Oh for the good old times! when all was new,
And every hour brought prodigies to view,
Our sires in unaffected language told

Of streams of amber and of rocks of gold:
Full of their theme, they spurned all idle art,
And the plain tale was trusted to the heart.
Now all is changed! We fume and fret, poor elves,
Less to display our subject than ourselves :
Whate'er we paint-a grot, a flower, a bird,
Heavens, how we sweat! laboriously absurd!
Words of gigantic bulk and uncouth sound,
In rattling triads the long sentence bound;
While points with points, with periods periods jar,
And the whole work seems one continued war!
Is not this sad?

F.-'Tis pitiful, Heaven knows;
'Tis wondrous pitiful. E'en take the prose :
But for the poetry-oh, that, my friend,
I still aspire-nay, smile not-to defend.

You praise our sires, but, though they wrote with force,
Their rhymes were vicious, and their diction coarse ;
We want their strength-agreed; but we atone
For that and more by sweetness all our own.

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And, envying the fame he cannot hope,
Spits his black venom at the dust of Pope.
Reptile accursed !-O 'memorable long,
If there be force in virtue or in song,'
O injured bard! accept the grateful strain,
Which I, the humblest of the tuneful train,
With glowing heart, yet trembling hand, repay,
For many a pensive, many a sprightly lay!
So may thy varied verse, from age to age,
Inform the simple, and delight the sage;
While canker'd Weston and his loathsome rhymes
Stink in the nose of all succeeding times.

Mrs Piozzi's share in this fantastic garland of exotic verse is hit off in one felicitous couplet :

See Thrale's gay widow with a satchel roam,
And bring in pomp her laboured nothings home!
Tasteless bibliomaniacs are sketched-those who
On black-letter pore,

And what they do not understand, adore;
Buy at vast sums the trash of ancient days,
And draw on prodigality for praise.

These, when some lucky hit, or lucky price,
Has blessed them with The Boke of Gode Advice,
For ekes and algates only deign to seek,
And live upon a whilome for a week.

The Baviad was a paraphrase of the first satire of Persius. In the year following, encouraged by its success, Gifford produced The Maviad, an imitation of Horace, levelled largely at the corruptors of the drama; the little-known poetasters Bavius and Mævius being stigmatised together as poetasters by Virgil, while Mævius is contemptuously treated by Horace. In the Maviad also the Della Cruscan authors-who attempted dramas as well as odes and elegies-are gibbeted in satiric verse; but Gifford was sufficiently catholic in his dislikes to include O'Keefe, Holcroft, and Morton among the objects of his most vehement condemnation. The plays of Kotzebue and Schiller, then first translated and much in vogue, he also confounded in the same denunciation as 'heavy, lumbering, monotonous stupidity,' worse even than 'the lively nonsense of O'Keefe and Co.'

Both satires are strangely planless, rambling, miscellaneous, at times irrelevant, and not even always satirical or abusive. Gifford could praise with perspicacity, as when in the Baviad he laments that lords and dukes were victims of metromania, 'curs'd with a sickly taste, while Burns' pure nurture runs to waste.' And a good bit of the Mæviad is eulogy of the character and art of his friend Hoppner the painter. James Boswell comes in repeatedly for severe treatment; and some of the most vicious remarks are not in the text but in the footnotes, which often fill more than half the page. Thus Wonderful is the profundity of Bathos! I thought that O'Keefe had reached the bottom of it; but, as uncle Bowling says, I thought a d-n'd lie for Holcroft, Reynolds, and Morton have sunk beneath him. They have happily found "in the lowest deep a lower still," and persevere in exploring it with an emulation that does them honour.' Holcroft is a poor stupid wretch, to whom infidelity and disloyalty have given a momentary notoriety, . . . and opened the theatre to two or three of his grovelling and senseless productions.' In 1797 a certain Williams, who assumed the name of Anthony Pasquin for his 'ribald strains' (a victim of a different type), aggrieved at his well-merited castigation in the Baviad, was nonsuited in an action against Gifford's publisher; though Gifford's statement was 'that he was so lost to every sense of decency and shame that his acquaintance was infamy and his touch poison.' The Tory bias is plain here and elsewhere. The following passage from the Mæviad explains the satirist's design :

Sick of th' eternal croak, which, ever near,
Beat like the death-watch on my tortured ear;
And sure, too sure, that many a genuine child
Of truth and nature, check'd his wood-notes wild,
(Dear to the feeling heart,) in doubt to win
The vacant wanderer, mid the unceasing din

Of this hoarse rout; I seized at length the wand;
Resolv'd, tho' small my skill, tho' weak my hand,
The mischief, in its progress, to arrest,

And exorcise the soil of such a pest.

Gifford in 1800 tried a third satire, an Epistle to Peter Pindar (Dr Wolcot), which, being founded on personal animosity, is more remarkable for its passionate vehemence and abuse than for its point or justice, felicity or correctness. Wolcot replied with A Cut at a Cobbler, and, by-and-by, with a personal assault (page 663). The notoriety of Gifford's satires pointed him out as the man to edit the Anti-Jacobin, a weekly paper started by Canning and others to ridicule and expose the political agitators of the times. Established in November 1797, it survived only till July 1798, but the connection thus formed with politicians and men of rank was afterwards serviceable to Gifford; he was made paymaster of the gentlemen-pensioners and commissioner of the lottery, with an income from the two offices of £900. In 1802 he published a translation of Juvenal, to which was prefixed his sketch of his own life, a simple and unaffected autobiography. When his Juvenal was attacked in the Critical Review, Gifford replied in An Examination, which pleasantly compared his reviewer to a toad:

During my apprenticeship, I enjoyed perhaps as many places as Scrub [in Farquhar's Beaux' Stratagem]; though I suspect they were not altogether so dignified: the chief of them was that of a planter of cabbages in a bit of ground which my master held near the town. It was the decided opinion of Panurge that the life of a cabbage-planter was the safest and pleasantest in the world. I found it safe enough, I confess, but not altogether pleasant; and therefore took every oppor tunity of attending to what I liked better, which hap pened to be, watching the actions of insects and reptiles, and, among the rest, of a huge toad. I never loved toads, but I never molested them; for my mother had early bid me remember that every living thing had the same Maker as myself; and the words always rang in my The toad, then, who had taken up his residence under a hollow stone in a hedge of blind nettles, I used to watch for hours together. It was a lazy, lumpish animal, that squatted on its belly, and perked up its hideous head with two glazed eyes, precisely like a Critical Reviewer. In this posture, perfectly satisfied with itself, it would remain as if it were a part of the stone, till the cheerful buzzing of some winged insect provoked it to give signs of life. The dead glare of its eyes then brightened into a vivid lustre, and it awkwardly shuffled to the entrance of its cell, and opened its detestable mouth to snap the passing fly or honey-bee. Since I have marked the manners of the Critical Reviewers, these passages of my youth have often occurred to me.

ears.

These are specimens of Gifford on Peter Pindar:

But what is he, that with a Mohawk's air
‘Cries havock, and lets slip the dogs of war?'
A bloated mass, a gross, blood-bolter'd clod,
A foe to man, a renegade from God,

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Lo here the reptile! who from some dark cell, Where all his veins with native poison swell, Crawls forth, a slimy toad, and spits, and spues The crude abortions of his loathsome muse, On all that Genius, all that Worth holds dear, Unsullied rank, and piety sincere ; While idiot mirth the base defilement lauds, And malice, with averted face, applauds !

Lo here the brutal sot! who, drench'd with gin Squeals out (with oaths and blasphemies between) The impious song, the tale, the jest obscene; And careless views, amidst the barbarous roar, His few grey hairs strew, one by one, the floor!

...

In

Besides his version of Juvenal, Gifford translated Persius, and edited the plays of Massinger, Ford, and Shirley, and the works of Ben Jonson. 1808 John Murray, with the co-operation of Walter Scott and Southey, resolved on starting a review, in opposition to the now famous Edinburgh, and Gifford was selected as editor. In his hands the Quarterly Review became a powerful political and literary journal, to which leading statesmen and famous authors equally contributed. He continued to discharge his duties as editor until within two years of his death on 31st December 1826; and he was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Gifford was high-spirited, courageous, and sincere; but in most of his writings there was a strong tinge of personal acerbity and even virulence. He was a good hater, and as he was opposed to all political visionaries and reformers, his wrath had seldom time to cool. Even where no such prejudices could interfere, his literary criticism was frequently disfigured by the same temper; whoever, dead or alive, had ventured to say aught against Ben Jonson, or write what he deemed unsatisfactory comments on his favourite dramatists, was assailed with a vehemence ludicrously disproportioned to the offence; too many of those whom he for one reason or another disapproved were described as toads and reptiles. His attacks on Hazlitt, Lamb, and Leigh Hunt-ay, and on Keats (for the Endymion article of 1818 was almost certainly his), in the Quarterly, have no pretensions to be fair or candid criticism. His object was to crush such authors as were opposed to the Government of the day, or who departed from his canons of literary propriety. Even the best and most spirited of his criticisms lack width of view and candour, and accordingly fail to produce their effect. Hazlitt returned his compliments in an open letter, and by a bitter attack on him in the Spirit of the Age. Looking with distrust and

His

suspicion on the growing importance of the United States, Gifford kept alive among the English aristocracy a feeling of dislike or hostility towards America as unwise as it was ungenerous. best service to literature was his edition of Ben Jonson, in which he successfully vindicated the great classic from unjust aspersions. His small but sinewy intellect, as a critic put it, was well employed in bruising the butterflies of the Della Cruscan Muse. Some of his shorter poemsone in affectionate remembrance of a faithful maidservant, one on a trip to Greenwich Hill on the 1st of May, &c.—are kindly, even tender; but his fame must rest on his incisiveness as satirist and his influence as critic and annotator. Possibly the story of his early struggles may be read when his other writings are forgotten.

The Rolliad, a series of political satires written by some Whigs of wit and fashion, attracted universal attention and was wonderfully popular. The idea is original, though the authors had the Dunciad before their eyes; they cleverly burlesqued Homer and Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton, and imitated Dryden and Churchill; and the level of prose and verse is so high that it is strange both should have been so utterly forgotten. The Anti-Jacobin is, with a few brilliant exceptions, mainly a series of heavy political pamphlets; the Rolliad and its companion pieces are, on the whole, more varied and sprightly. But the innumerable topical allusions in the Rolliad, the large number of pieces that depend for their point on forgotten incidents and unimportant persons, have in this case hastened the oblivion that is the usual fate of political satire unless it dips deep into the elemental humour of human nature, and is the work, not of brilliant wits, but of a true genius. The greater ferocity of the Anti-Jacobin, its savage earnestness, is largely explained by the fact that the Rolliad appeared before the French Revolution had raised greater issues and stirred men's souls to their uttermost depths. The so-called Criticisms on the Rolliad appeared first in the Morning Herald, a London newspaper, in 1784-85, and were a succession of satires on Colonel John Rolle, afterwards Lord Rolle (1750-1842), a staunch adherent of Pitt, the blundering and passionate M.P. for Devon, who made himself obnoxious to the Opposition by his hostility to Fox. He lived to do homage to Queen Victoria at her coronation; but, eightyseven years old, he stumbled and fell on the steps of the throne, whereupon, as is well remembered, the young queen graciously and gracefully rose and came forward to meet him.

In 1784 Pitt had been returned with an overwhelming majority. The Whigs, smarting under defeat, were naturally eager to show in every way their superiority in wit and eloquence over sheer weight of numbers-brought to bear in the House of Commons, as they maintained, mainly by the

loud and prolonged cheering and hissing of the 'stupid party,' comprising the home plutocrats and the Indian nabobs. The 'Westminster Scrutiny' in 1784-85, when the Government party tried-but failed-to oust Fox from his seat at Westminster in favour of Sir Cecil Wray, gave the Whigs something to rejoice over; few political events ever called forth such a wealth of squibs, lampoons, and caricatures. The Rolliad consists of pretended criticism on a supposititious epic poem, from which quotations were now and again made, enough only being given at a time to serve as text for the comment. The plot was suggested by a boast of Rolle that he was descended from the Norman Duke Rollo; who (disguised as a smuggler) is made to sail to England, and, by help of Merlin, has visions of the glories of his descendants in England, down to the most distinguished scion of the stock, the strong-lunged Tory member who coughed down Burke. The vision of his descendants' career is, as might be expected, not wholly pleasing-thus several of the principal representatives of the family are seen to come to an untimely and shameful end. In the Dedication' it is indicated that the Rolliad 'owed its existence to the memorable speech of the member for Devonshire on the first discussion of the Westminster Scrutiny, when he so emphatically proved himself the genuine descendant of Duke Rollo; and in the noble contempt which he showed for the rights of electors seemed to breathe the very soul of his great progenitor, who came to extirpate the liberties of Englishmen with the sword.' And the last of Rollo's stock had at various times in his career (so the vision showed) had humiliating experiences -as at Westminster School, for example:

In vain ten thousand Busbys should employ
Their pedant arts thy genius to destroy;
In vain at either end thy Rolle assail,
To learning proof alike at head or tail.

The planless plan allows the free handling of all the supporters of the Government most open to criticism, burlesque, or innuendo as bores, fools, or venal persons; the bishops are not spared

Who still, submissive to their Maker's nod, Adore their Sovereign, and respect their God; Cumberland the dramatist and Rowland Hill the popular preacher are sharply dealt with; the hygienic merits of the Highland kilt and of souchong (as compared with stingo and October) are lauded in mock heroics; and for the comfort of the luxurious Indian contingent, it is proposed to introduce a few velvet-cushioned couches of ivory in place of the hard benches of the House of Commons.

The Criticisms on the Rolliad appeared in a 'First Part' and a 'Second Part;' and this series of clever jeux d'esprit was followed by Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, Political Eclogues, and Political Miscellanies. The design of the Probationary Odes was probably suggested

by Pope's ridicule of Cibber; and the death of Whitehead, the poet-laureate, in 1785, was seized upon by the Whig wits as affording an opportunity for satirising some of the political and literary characters of the day, conspicuous as members or supporters of the Government. Pitt, Dundas, Jenkinson (Lord Liverpool), Lord Thurlow, Major John Scott (agent for Warren Hastings), Harry Dundas (Viscount Melville), and others were the objects of these humorous sallies and personal invectives; while among literary men, Joseph and Thomas Warton, Sir John Hawkins, Macpherson (the translator of Ossian), and Sir N. W. Wraxall, M.P., traveller, and author of many books of travels, were selected for attack. The idea (somewhat analogous to that of the Rejected Addresses) was to make the personages write, in competition for the laureateship, poems as specimens of their powers; thus giving the parodists scope for satirising their characters, caricaturing their peculiarities, and burlesquing their style.

Though there is a great variety of rhymes and of subjects, there is a wonderful unanimity of feeling throughout, and it has always been difficult to say who was the author of the several pieces; doubtless many were the joint work of several pens. The chief contributors to this gallery of burlesque portraits and clever caricatures were: Dr French Laurence (1757-1809), the friend of Burke, who was the chief editor or director of the satires; he was ultimately chancellor of the diocese of Oxford and judge of admiralty for the Cinque Ports. He wrote also odes and sonnets, and translations from the Italian.-General Richard Fitzpatrick (1747–1813), a brother of the last Earl of Upper Ossory, who served in the army in America, was long in Parliament, and held the offices of Secretary-at-War and Irish Secretary. Fitzpatrick was the most intimate friend of Charles James Fox; he was famous as a wit, and published several poems, satirical and other.-Richard Tickell (1715-93), the grandson of Addison's friend and the brotherin-law of Sheridan, besides his contributions to the Rolliad, was author of The Wreath of Fashion and other poetical pieces, and of a lively political pamphlet entitled Anticipation, 1778. Tickell was a commissioner of stamps; he was a great favourite in society; yet in a moment of despondency he threw himself from a window in Hampton Court Palace, and was killed on the spot. —Joseph Richardson (1755-1803), a journalist and ultimately proprietor of the Morning Post, was author of a comedy called The Fugitive, and was partner with Sheridan in Drury Lane Theatre. From 1776 till his death he sat in Parliament.

Among the other contributors to the Rolliad were Lord John Townsend (1757-1833); Mr George Ellis (1753-1815), editor of Early English poetry, friend of Scott, and afterwards one of the founders of the Tory Anti-Jacobin (see pages 673, 678); Sir Robert Adair, Fox's intimate, a capable diplomatist; and General Burgoyne (1723-92), who surrendered to

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