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Meviad, appeared and effected the disenchantment of all such as had been induced to admire the odes, sonnets, epistles, &c. of Merry and his muses.

The Baviad is a witty paraphrase of the first satire of Persius.

"Oh curas hominum; O quantum est in rebus inane."

But it possesses all the terseness of Juvenal, with a little more decency, and less declamation in expression. The marginal notes compose a commentary still more malicious than the text, and reveal a multitude of little personal details, or comprise quotations, which demonstrate all the enormity of the offenders, whom the poet chastises with his inexorable pen.

It is not alone the Florentine coteries which is branded with the derisive epithets of Gifford; but the satire reviews, in this new Dunciad, the degenerate dramatic authors, such as O'Keefe, Morton, and Reynolds, and demonstrates their trite absurdity. The Meviad is but the supplement to the Baviad, and it was the coup de grace to all those poets who had clamoured in the first instance, that Mr. Gifford was but the slave, hired to pursue with his insults the triumphal car of their victory. This double satire excites but little interest in the present day. In order to survive the circumstances which give it birth, it is requisite that this species of poem should paint the ridiculous features of manners rather than of mind. Lord Byron

was inspired by the mockery of the Baviad and the Meviad, when he composed his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Unfortunately, all the decisions of Byron have not been confirmed like those of Mr. Gifford. The Dunciad✶ of Pope was the common model of both.

The English have often succeeded in the department of satire; but their satires, more energetic than ingenious, are also more affluent in invectives than in piquantes allusions. They may be reproached with all the defects which the English critics have themselves discovered in Juvenal; while they are less obscure than the Latin poet, because they call things by their own names more freely than he, they either descend into a coarse familiarity, or plunge into a style of inflation when they attempt to rise. Under pretence of stripping vice of its deceitful mask and cloak, they lay bare to the eye, with a frequently indecent license, the nakedness of its lineaments. This branch of English literature, is, in short, one of the most faithful indices of the national character, and deserves being studied in the burlesque epopee of Hudibras, in the political satires of Dryden, the elegant imitations of Donne and Horace, by Pope, and that of Juvenal by Johnson, &c.

Mr. Gifford has translated Juvenal into English verse, with a happy freedom of expression,

* Lord Byron, as a satirist, appears to owe still greater obligations to the caustic energy of the poet Churchill, author of the Rosciad.

which does not exclude poetical merit. He has published excellent editions of Massinger, of Ben Jonson and Shirley; but he is more especially known as the principal editor of the Quarterly Review and he has renounced poetry, in order to give the law to poets. Poetry first drew him from an obscure condition. Born of poor parents, and left an orphan at an early age, he was bound apprentice to a shoemaker.

Some illustrious patrons favoured his taste for study by getting him admitted to the University of Oxford.

In order to evince that he had every kind of right to protest, in the name of taste, against the bathos and pathos of the disciples of Della Crusca, Mr. Gifford introduced into his notes on the Meviad, two elegies, replete with grace and sentiment. That which commences with these words

"I wish I was where Anna lies,"

exhibits an affecting simplicity, which reminds one of the regret of the two young princes for Imogine, in the play of Cymbeline.

There is another satirist, somewhat fallen into oblivion latterly, but whose buffooneries, and sometimes whose cynicism, have made a stir in their time. I refer to Dr. Walcot, commonly called Peter Pindar, who has given to satire the form of an ode. But he should rather be considered as a parodist than a satirist, and take his rank among the class of poetical caricaturists.

Peter Pindar is the Cobbett and Gillray of modern English poetry. In the character of a physician, and for some time in that of an ecclesiastic, Dr. Walcot has more real affinity with Rabelais in his taste for the burlesque. He is possessed by an actual passion for parody: he rails at kings, but he does not spare the people. He rains down his torrent of rhyming sarcasms on poets, authors, and painters; but he lavishes them with equal good will on professional critics. Did not Peter Pindar partake more of the buffoon than the libeller, an epitaph, like that composed on Aretin, might be composed for him :

"Qui giace l'Aretin poeta Tosco

Che disse mal d'ognun fuorche di Cristo
Scusandosi col dir: no lo conosco."

"Here lies Arctin, the Tuscan poet, who has libelled all the world excepting his Saviour, for which he excused himself by saying that he did not know him."

The mind grows fatigued with these continual palinodies, with this derisive impartiality. It is asked, for the advantage of what virtue is it that the satanic buffoon wages war? To Peter Pindar might be readily applied the moral of Fontaine's fable of the Laughers; but if you open at hazard a collection of these burlesque verses; if you read one of the arguments, and commence a poem, you are carried on by its real verve, and by a facility of versification, which prompts an excuse for the

defect of elegance, and the gross tone of divers of the traits of humour.

Poor Mrs. Piozzi is one of the victims of the Pindaric doctor. The prosy tittle tattle of this friend of Johnson is transferred by him into rhyme, and contrasted with the sometimes not less puerile verbiage of Boswell, who enacted the part of a kind of Cornac to the illustrious pedant. The science of Sir Joseph Banks did not inspire him with more respect. This grave president of the Royal Academy is represented as maintaining the thesis, that fleas appertain to the family of lobsters. But even Pliny and Buffon would not have escaped being devoted to the ridicule of this determined laugher. Peter Pindar is especially inexorable towards the painters and Benjamin West. He versifies the catalogues of the exhibition with a humiliating irony, or with a not less unsparing veracity. At length, audaciously penetrating to the fire side of George III., he catches up his royal expressions, and translates them into his burlesque language: he traduces his majesty, and gives him no more than a secondary part to play in an epopee, of which the hero is a certain uncleanly insect, for which French delicacy, happy as it is in poetical designations, has not even deigned to invent one of those characteristic paraphrases, by virtue of which the animal, which lives on acorns, and other beasts whom the Almighty names in Genesis, are not altogether excluded from our poems. A louse, since it is necessary to call it by its name, is the Eneas or

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