No More Learning

He was interred with much pomp
in Westminster abbey, where an imposing monument, erected by
the unwearying duke and duchess, bears, together with Pope's,
the light-minded poet's own characteristic epitaph
Life is a jest, and all things show it;
I thought so once, and now I know it.
His easy-going, affectionate disposition made Gay a general
favourite, even though, as Johnson observed, the wits regarded
him rather as a playfellow than a partner. He was utterly devoid
of energy ; and though, in complaining of his treatment by the
court, he laments ‘My hard fate! I must get nothing, write for or
against,' it is very far from clear what duties he would have been
fit to discharge, had they been imposed upon him. He was, in
truth, predestined on every account, in Pope's phrase, to 'die
unpension’d with a hundred friends. '
Gay's longer poems, with the exception of The Shepherd's
Week and Trivia, are dead. Of the shorter, some of the eclogues,
such as The Birth of the Squire, The Toilette, The Tea-Table and
The Funeral, contain many witty passages; and the epistles are
all interesting, especially Mr Pope's Welcome from Greece, the
ottava rima of which has a spontaneous flash and felicity. Written
on the completion of Pope's translation of The Iliad, it represents
all the poet's friends as gathering to meet him on his return to
town, each being characterised in one or two apt lines, or by a brief
pert epithet, in the happiest possible manner. Among the mis-
cellaneous pieces which deserve to escape neglect is the sprightly
Ladies' Petition to the Honourable the House of Commons, in
which the maids of Exeter protest against their loss of the chance
of marriage through the interloping competition of widows? .
6
&
1 G. F. Underhill calls this poem 'the least doubtful piece' in the collection known
as Gay’s Chair, a little volume published in 1820, with a life of Gay, by his nephew,
Joseph Baller. There seems good reason to doubt the authenticity of some of the
pieces there attributed to Gay; though the chair, in whose secret drawer they were
found, has & well-authenticated history.


## p. 165 (#189) ############################################

6
Ambrose Philips
165
Gay's parodies of Ambrose Philips in The Shepherd's Week
(which pleased by the very quality they were intended to ridicule)
were suborned by Pope, and the quarrel was accentuated by the
fact that Ambrose not only belonged to the rival or whig faction
(he was secretary of the Hanover club in 1714) but was also a friend
and adherent of Addison. A native of the midlands, Ambrose
Philips (born in 1675) was educated at Shrewsbury and St John's
college, Cambridge (1693–6), of which he was fellow from 1699 to
1708. At Cambridge, he began writing English verse. In 1709,
he abridged Hacket's wellknown Life of Archbishop Williams.
On 9 March of the same year, he addressed, from Copenhagen, his
Epistle to the Earl of Dorset, Prior's early patron. It was published
by Steele in The Tatler and praised as a great 'winter-piece. '
His Pastorals appeared in the following autumn in Tonson's
Miscellany, his being the first, and Pope's the last, in this same
volume. In The Guardian", Ambrose was thoughtlessly praised by
Thomas Tickell as the only worthy successor of Spenser, Pope being
completely ignored. Philips had also been cordially applauded in
The Spectator for his artless type of eclogue. Pretending to criticise
the rival pastorals and compare them, Pope, in an anonymous con-
tribution to The Guardian”, gave the preference to Philips, but
quoted all his worst passages as his best, and placed by the side of
them his own finest lines, which, he says, want rusticity, and often
deviate into downright poetry. The satire stung, as was intended,
and Philips bought a rod and hung it up at a popular coffeehouse
(Button's) in order to carry out his threatened chastisement of
Pope in public. The encounter was averted by Pope's prudence.
To keep up the reciprocation of malevolence, Pope scoffed at
Philips in The Dunciad and elsewhere as one of Curll's authors,
'a Pindaric writer in red stockings. ' Philips played his cards
sufficiently well to extract some very fair Irish sinecures from the
dominant whig party, but he did not live to enjoy them. The
poems of Philips which please best, says Johnson, are those
which from Pope or Pope's adherents procured him the name of
Namby-Pamby, the poems of short lines by which he paid his
court to all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the
realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery. ' Henry Carey, the
author of Sally in our Ally, mocked Philips under this name, and
Swift called his pretty waxworks 'little flams. ' But the machina-
tions of Pope managed to raise a perfect storm of ridicule, which,
6
· Nos. 22, 23, 30, and 32.
2 No. 40.


## p. 166 (#190) ############################################

166
Lesser Verse Writers
in numberless parodies and broadsides, broke over the new
versification, as it was called. The line generally consists of three
trochees, followed by an extra-stressed monosyllabic foot. Many
critics have pronounced these sweetmeats delightful, though
cloying; and, it must be granted, in spite of ridicule, that Philips
had a genuine sensibility and a kindness for the elder music in
English poetry which is to his credit and which his age, for the
most part, ignored. In 1723, he brought out A Collection of old
Ballads, including Robin Hood, Johnny Armstrong and the famous
Children in the Wood, much belauded by Addison. The ballads
are, in the main, bad versions derived from current broadsides ;
but the collection, such as it was, was one of the earliest of its kind.
His only play of any note, The Distressed Mother, was derived
immediately from Racine's Andromaque. He died in Hanson
street, London, on 18 June 1749. His poems, with a dedication
to the duke of Newcastle, had been published in the year before
his death.
Thomas Parnell is, probably, now less remembered for his verse
than because of the fact that his life was written by Goldsmith
and Johnson, and that from his younger brother was descended
Charles Stewart Parnell. The son of a commonwealth's man, who,
at the restoration, left Congleton in Cheshire, where the family
had been long established and, settling in Ireland, purchased an
estate which, together with his land in Cheshire, was afterwards
owned by the poet, Thomas Parnell was born at Dublin in 1679.
In 1693, he was admitted at Trinity college, Dublin, where in 1700
he proceeded M. A. , and was ordained deacon under an episcopal
dispensation on the score of age. Swift's friend Ashe, bishop of
Clogher, named him archdeacon of that see in 1706, an appointment
followed by his marriage to Anne, daughter of Thomas Minchin of
Tipperary. Her death in 1711 seems to have unsteadied the young
archdeacon's mind. Swift and Stella conceived a friendliness for
the bereaved poet, who was taken to sup with Bolingbroke and was
introduced to the lord treasurer (Oxford). By this time, he had
changed his political vesture, and, in April 1713, he wrote a Poem
on Queen Anne's Peace. About this time, he became an intimate
of the Scriblerus club and of Pope, who designed him to be one
of 'the children of Homer. ' Swift whipped up his Irish friends
to procure Parnell a prebend. In May 1716, archbishop King
presented the poet with the vicarage of Finglass, worth over
£100 a year. Meanwhile, he had become inseparable from Pope


## p. 167 (#191) ############################################

Thomas. Parnell
167
at Binfield and the Bath, and he retained his position in the
Scriblerus circle to the last. He died suddenly at Chester (his
end being hastened by habitual intemperance)' on his way to
Ireland in October 1718. His publications during his lifetime
had been in periodicals; but he left many unprinted compositions,
of which those which Pope thought best were selected by him
and dedicated to the earl of Oxford, who wrote appreciatively
of the Noctes he had spent in the company of Pope, Swift,
Parnell and the doctor. Johnson, in conversation, deplored that
Goldsmith's Life of the poet was so thin; but he made his own
sketch an opportunity for a most splendid eulogy of Goldsmith's
ease and versatility. Goldsmith wrote a fair epitaph, which was
eclipsed by Johnson’s? .
Goldsmith, Collins and Blair show signs of having studied
Parnell, whose own work, apart from the manifest impress of Pope
and Swift, was influenced, it is thought, to some extent, by Milton.
Apart from his contribution to Pope's Homer, which took the
form of a learned essay in the taste of the time on 'The Life,
Writings and Learnings of Homer,' and a few imitative poems,
Parnell did not write anything of importance. Pope was glad of
his aid at the time, but, after Parnell's death, expressed a hope
that his essay might be made 'less defective. ' His poems, gene-
rally in heroic measure, run smoothly. The Flies, an Eclogue,
has merit as a picture. An Elegy to an old Beauty enjoys an
adventitious fame. After ridiculing the lady's strenuous efforts at
resisting the ravages of time, Parnell goes on to explain how the
daughter Fanny has acquired her mother's old artifices, with
interest:
And all that's madly wild, or oddly gay
We call it only pretty Fanny's way.
A Nightpiece on Death is an early example of a convention which
reached its acme with Gray's Elegy: A Hymn to Contentment
is another fashionable exercise on the theme of Plantin, Desportes,
Wotton and Pomfret, written in easy flowing octosyllabics. All
these copies of verse—the last and most meritorious of which as
a model, and greatly admired during the age of Johnson, is The
Hermit-were published posthumously in Poems on Several
1 Hearne says he was undoubtedly killed by the immoderate drinking of 'mild
ale. '
? Qui sacerdos pariter et poeta, utrasque partes ita implevit, ut neque sacerdoti
suavitas poetae, nec poetae sacerdotis sanctitas, deesset.
3 Prompted by contrariness of his own or by Johnson's dislike of Gray, Goldsmith
used to say that he preferred Parnell's Nightpiece greatly to the Elegy.


## p. 168 (#192) ############################################

168
Lesser Verse Writers
! !
1
Occasions, issued by the poet's friend, corrector and patron
Pope, in December 1721. The only separate volume issued
previously by Parnell was his Homer's Battle of the Frogs and
Mice with the Remarks of Zoilus (May 1717), satirising two
objects of Pope's aversion, Theobald and Dennis. His scholar-
ship had been of material service to Pope as translator, apart
from his Introductory Essay on Homer (1715), which Pope, as
usual, exalted in public and deplored in private.
a
Anne, daughter of Sir William Kingsmill of Sidmonton, was born
in April 1661, became maid of honour to queen Mary of Modena
and was a friend of Anne Killigrew, who had kindred tastes; but,
in 1684, she abandoned her court position and married colonel
Heneage Finch, afterwards earl of Winchilsea. In 1690, Ardelia
(her name as authoress) settled at beautiful Eastwell and began
to write verses for circulation among her friends, the Thynnes,
Tuftons, Twysdens and other Kentish people of distinction. She
died in Cleveland row and was buried at Eastwell in August
1720. She had adopted the practice of writing,
Betray'd by solitude to try
Amusements which the prosperous fly,
and soon showed that she had an eye for observing country scenes
and that she loved them for their own sake. She began by trans-
lations from French and Italian, and went on with blank verse
dramas after the model of the virtuous and matchless Orinda;
she wrote songs after Prior, pindarics after Cowley and fables
after La Fontaine. In 1713, she was persuaded to publish a
selection of her poems. She left a large number of further
poems in two manuscript volumes, one folio, the other octavo;
these were edited by Myra Reynolds in 1903 and cannot fairly
be said to have enhanced Lady Winchilsea's reputation. It had
hitherto mainly depended on the discovery by Wordsworth that
there were affinities with his own predominant mood in a few of
her poems of 1713, especially the sentimental and meditative
soliloquy entitled A Nocturnal Reverie, an enunciation of rural
charms in which almost every other line begins with the word
'when, while the last fifty verses conclude with the following
two couplets :
In such a Night let Me abroad remain,
Till Morning breaks, and All's confus'd again;
Our Cares, our Toils, our Clamours are renew'd,
Or Pleasures, seldom reach'd, again pursu'd.


## p. 169 (#193) ############################################

Lady Winchilsea
169
a
in
A few other poems, such as an ode To the Nightingale, sustain
the same kind of impression, which gained indefinitely from the
twilight of Eastwell as well as from the rarity of Ardelia's slim
volume. Wordsworth's discovery was taken up with enthusiasm by
Matthew Arnold, Edmund Gosse and others, and Lady Winchilsea
was cited as a rara avis, a woodlark among those town sparrows,
the best accredited poets of the days of queen Anne. To Pope, Gray
and Prior, she had just seemed a female wit, with a stray predilection,
and some genuine taste, for riming. The appearance of her poems
in bulk certainly strengthens the idea that her forte was gay and
complimentary verse of the occasional order, and that she ought to
rank not as a rival of Dyer and Collins, but as an imitator of Prior
and a precursor of Gay, Cowper and Northcote. Her light verse,
upon which she bestowed much pains, was based upon the miscel-
lany poems of Dorset, Sedley and their queen Anne successors.
Her verses To Mr F now Earl of w, written in 1689, in an
886886 stanza, are among the best of their kind at that date. Her
Fanscombe Barn, with its jolly beggars, is a tolerable parody of
the Miltonic (written a few years after The Splendid Shilling);
but her 'Pindaricks, including The Spleen, issued separately
in a miscellany of 1701, as well as in the volume of 1713, are
unbearable. The Spleen contains the lines
Now the jonquille o’ercomes the feeble brain,
We faint beneath the Aromatick Pain.
The adjective was borrowed from Dryden's Annus Mirabilis ; the
phrase was appropriated by Pope in his Essay on Man, and the
association of the odour of the jonquil with delicious pain by
Shelley (Epipsychidion). Two of Lady Winchilsea's poems, The
Sigh and To Mr Jervas (the famous portrait painter and translator
of Don Quixote), were printed in Steele’s Miscellany (1714), her
Lines to Prior in Prior's Miscellaneous Works; To Mr Pope in
the early collected editions of Pope.
A writer similar in calibre to Lady Winchilsea and, like her,
destined to be raised too high by disproportioned praise, is John
Pomfret, son of a vicar of Luton, whose studies were carried on at
Bedford and at Queens' college, Cambridge (where he graduated
M. A. in 1688). His elegy upon the death of queen Mary was the
prelude to his taking orders and was soon rewarded by two con-
siderable Bedfordshire rectories. He was a good early example of
the cultivated, poetizing, archaeologizing, chess-playing divines of
the eighteenth century. In 1699, he gave to the world his Poems


## p. 170 (#194) ############################################

170
Lesser Verse Writers
on Several Occasions, the sale of which was stimulated next year
when he issued anonymously The Choice: A Poem written by a
Person of Quality. The poem obtained adventitious fame. At first,
it was held to have been composed by a personage of distinction.
Then, it was said to have been modelled upon a study of Sir William
Temple's philosophic retirement among his peaches at Sheen. And
the public was still more interested when it learned that the poet's
frankly expressed aspiration to have no wife' had displeased the
bishop of London (Compton), to whom he had been recommended for
preferment. As a matter of fact, he married and had a son, shortly
before his death, at thirty-five, in 1702. The Choice was no more and
no less than a familiar exercise, adapted to the taste of the time, of
the old Bonheur de ce Monde theme, sung to death by the French
poets, and best known to us in the poems of Wotton and Samuel
Rogers (‘Mine be a cot'). The versification will strike no one today as
being (that which the theme demands) exceptionally neat; and the
best modern anthologists ignore the poem. But, when the scheme for
the Lives of the Poets was submitted by the booksellers to Johnson,
the name of Pomfret (together with three others) was added by his
advice, chiefly, it seems, on the ground of Pomfret's ineradicable
popularity (half a century later, Robert Southey is found solemnly
asking 'Why is Pomfret's “ Choice” the most popular poem in the
language? '). Johnson said that probably no composition in our
language had been so often perused and that it was the favourite
of readers who, without vanity or criticism, seek only their own
amusement. That Pomfret pleased many, surely argued some merit.
Now, however, he pleases few, or is quite forgotten.
>
>
>
Thomas Tickell was born in 1688, at his father's vicarage,
Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and, in April 1701, entered Queen's
college, Oxford, of which he became a fellow in November 1700—
a poetaster preferred over better men, according to the relentless
tory, Thomas Hearne. In 1711, he acted as deputy professor at
Oxford, where, according to the same authority, he delivered a “silly'
course on bucolics, in which what was good was taken from Scaliger.
Tickell, who was not 'one of these scholars who wear away their
lives in closets,' found a stepping-stone into the outer world through
the patronage of Addison. While still at Oxford, he had expressed
his admiration of Addison (To Mr Addison on his Opera of
Rosamond) in extravagant terms. On arriving in London, he
made Addison's acquaintance. Tickell was an accomplished
poetizer and man of letters, and a graceful, though not profound,


## p. 171 (#195) ############################################

Thomas Tickell
171
scholar, by no means the vain conceited coxcomb of Hearne's
imagining. Addison was pleased with a homage that was worth
accepting. In October 1712, Tickell published his Poem to his
Excellency the Lord Privy Seal on the Prospect of Peace, and,
though the piece supported the tory peace of Utrecht, Addison,
in The Spectator), spoke warmly of its ‘noble performance. ' Pope
praised its poetical images and fine painting—now undecipherable.
Tickell repaid these compliments with compound interest. Verses
by him were prefixed to Addison's Cato, and, as Addison rose, his
admirer rose with him. Addison, as is well known, incurred Pope's
enmity mainly in his protégé's behalf. In October 1714, he asked
to be excused reading the first two books of Pope's Iliad, on the
ground that his interest in an English version of The Iliad had
been forestalled by Tickell, whose first book he had 'corrected. '
(He consented, however, according to Pope, to read the second
book. ) In June 1715, Pope's first volume and Tickell's first book
of The Iliad in English appeared almost simultaneously. Addison
described Tickell's version as the best ever done in any language.
Pope wrote bitterly of Cato's 'little senate' at Button's coffee-
house. Meanwhile, Pope's own like senate unmasked their
batteries. Parnell and Arbuthnot criticised the scholarship,
Jervas and Berkeley the verse, of Tickell’s translation. Pope
himself, in his Art of Sinking in Poetry, cites illustrative pas-
sages from Tickell's version. Apart from this quarrel, the chief
interest attaching to Tickell in literary history is in his character
as satellite, executor and panegyrist of Addison, and as supplanter
of Steele in Addison's estimation. In 1717, upon his appointment
as chief secretary in Ireland, Addison took Tickell with him. When
he became secretary of state, he appointed Tickell under-secretary;
and, shortly before his death, made him his literary executor, in-
structing him to collect his writings in a final and authentic edition.
Tickell addressed himself to this most difficult and delicate task
with so much loyalty and assiduity that, by 3 October 1721, the
collective edition of Addison's works was ready for the public, in
four sumptuous quarto volumes. It was prefaced by an unpretend-
ing notice, to which was appended the noble and pathetic elegy
(characterised by Johnson as “sublime and elegant') To the Earl of
Warwick on the Death of Mr Addison, which furnishes Tickell's
i No. 523.
· Who, when two wits on rival themes contest,
Approves them both, but likes the worst the best. '
Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot (Longleat Version), see Elwin and Courthope's. edn. ,
vol. II, p. 537.
a
2


## p. 172 (#196) ############################################

172
Lesser Verse Writers
1
1
>
sole but sufficient title-deed to the poetical estate. Of its thirty-
two lines, the most familiar, though not entirely the best, are,
perhaps, the following:
Can I forget the dismal night that gave
My soul's best part for ever to the grave!
How silent did his old companions tread
By midnight lamps, the mansions of the dead
Through breathing statues, then unheeded things,
Through rows of warriors, and through walks of kings!
What awe did the slow solemn knell inspire;
The pealing organ, and the pausing choir;
The duties by the lawn-rob'd prelate paid;
And the last words, that dust to dust conveyed !
Tickell did fair and, some think, ample justice to Steele in his
references to him. There can, however, be little doubt that
Steele had been distressed and grievously hurt by the rupture;
while the fact that Tickell should have taken his place in Addison's
affections must have been inexpressibly galling. His natural irrita-
tion had, no doubt, been intensified by Addison appointing Tickell
under-secretary, and, still more, by his making Tickell his literary
executor, offices which Steele might, naturally, have expected, had
all gone well, to fill himself. The omission of The Drummer from
Addison's works gave him the opening he desired. Steele objected
to Addison's essays being separately printed, while some of their
joint work was ignored. It seems certain that Addison contem-
plated a collective edition of his, writings, in which his own
personal contributions could be identified. Steele's ambition,
we must infer, was that he and his friend should go down to
posterity together. This hope was dashed to the ground by
the appointment, in his place, of Tickell as `Addison's literary
executor.
Tickell followed up the Irish career which Addison had opened
for him. In May 1724, he was appointed secretary to the lord
justices, and Carteret testifies to the ability with which he performed
the duties of his office. "Whiggissimus' though he was, he managed
,
to conciliate Swift. He seems to have retained no ill-feeling
against his detractors, and he died at peace at Bath on St George's
day, 1740. Johnson described his poem The Prospect of Peace,
beginning · The Haughty Gaul in ten campaigns o'erthrown,' as a
poem to be approved rather than admired; and this distinction
applies to all his verses, more or less (with the exception of the
elegy on Addison), including those in his favourite heroic measure,
On Queen Caroline's rebuilding of the Lodgings of the Black Prince
and Henry V at Queen's College, The Royal Progress, An Epistle


## p. 173 (#197) ############################################

Tickell and Addison
173
from a Lady in England to a Gentleman in Avignon (an anti-
jacobite piece, which ran to a fifth edition), a Fragment of a Poem
on Hunting, Part of the Fourth Book of Lucan, complimentary
poems To Mr Addison and To Sir Godfrey Kneller, two formal
poems entitled Oxford, and Kensington Gardens, and The First
Book of the Iliad.
Johnson denounced him for confusing Grecian deities and Gothic
fairies; both species were regarded by the critic as contemptible
even when apart, but, in conjunction, positively ridiculous. Outside
the range of his correct pentameters, Tickell essayed a wooden
ballad in eight and six, entitled Colin and Lucy, which was
translated into Latin by Vincent Bourne, and pronounced by
Gray and Goldsmith (himself an offender in this respect) to be
one of the best ballads in English. Gray, at any rate, ought to
have known better. Tickell had very few poetical notes at his
command, and none of them were 'wood-notes wild' suitable to
ballad or octosyllabic measure. His elegy rings true, as a sincere
commemoration of a notable literary friendship.
)
II
The minor versifiers of the eighteenth century, among whom
may be included some of the younger of Dryden's contemporaries,
cannot be said to enjoy, or to have enjoyed for some generations,
anything that approaches, even in the furthest degree, to what may
be called popularity. From circumstances which, to avoid repeti-
tion, will be more fully noticed in dealing with the second group of
them, they obtained a certain hold not merely on the standard
'collections, but on books of anthology with an educational
purpose. This lasted far into the nineteenth, and has not been
entirely relaxed in the twentieth, century. They, and their some-
what more interesting successors, furnished mottos and quotations
to at least three generations of prose writers greater than them-
selves, and even to the vague, floating treasury from which common
speech borrows things that, when the actual authors are read for
the first time, strike the reader if not with a wild surprise' at any
rate with an amused one. Very few are those who, except for a
special purpose, read many or any of these poets now; and fewer
still those who derive much enjoyment from the reading. Yet
they cannot be wholly neglected in such a work as this, though


## p. 174 (#198) ############################################

174
Lesser Verse Writers
it would be an exceedingly rash critic who entered upon the task
of dealing with them unconscious of its difficulties and dangers.
Even in the separation of the two groups, there must be something
that may well seem arbitrary; and there is the further difficulty
that, while the treatment accorded to a few-rather in the later
group than in this, but here, perhaps, also, in some cases—may seem
inadequate, objection may be taken in others to what may appear
too like a mere catalogue with ticket-comments. But no possible
arrangement could satisfy everybody: and, in the present case, the
adventure has been undertaken not lightly, and assisted at least by
an old familiarity with the subjects.
We must, of course, begin with the group which, as has been
said—though all its members lived into Pope's time, and two of
them were specially singled out by him as patrons, and, in a
way, patterns-represent, in actual historic relation, the younger
contemporaries of Dryden'. First come the pair just referred to,
and known now chiefly, if not wholly, by Pope's own words,
'Granville the polite [George Granville, first baron Lansdowne) and
knowing Walsh [William Walsh]. ' With them may be grouped
four others less known to even second-hand fame: Richard Duke,
George Stepney, William King (1663—1712) and Thomas Yalden,
who linger, mummy fashion, in the collections of British poets,
while two of them enjoy certain adventitious aids to personal
remembrance. For Stepney, a notable diplomatist in his day,
represented Marlborough in the taking-over of the principality of
Mindelheim, and King is constantly confused with his twenty years
younger namesake (1685-1763), the clever but venomous jacobite
principal of St Mary hall.
Granville, Lord Lansdowne, does not quite deserve, even from
a literary point of view, the neglect which has betaken him, and,
to all who can appreciate the genealogy of poetry-a thing which
has attractions far other than those affecting Dryasdust—is by no
means negligible. In him, we have, perhaps, the last remnant,
though only an imperfect one, of Caroline character, before we come
to the wholly, or almost wholly, 'Augustan’ lyric. That strange
fire which still burns, and occasionally even blazes, in Sedley and
Rochester and Aphra Behn, only glimmers in him; but it has not
quite gone out. It was, possibly, the presence of it, joined, as
an acute reader aware of the circumstances may suspect, to the
disapprobation, which he not obscurely hints, of the later character
of 'Myra,' which makes Johnson unjust to Lansdowne. This
1 As to Dryden's relations with Granville, see ante, vol. VIII, p. 55.


## p. 175 (#199) ############################################

6
George Granville (Lord Lansdowne) 175
grandson of Sir Bevil Granville, a descendant of the hero
of the Azores, could not, so far as he was personally con-
cerned, have been distasteful to the censor. He 'endeavoured
to be true at once to the King [James II] and the Church,'
which exceedingly difficult task Johnson would himself certainly
have essayed.
He was the author of a sentence which has
frequently expressed the wishes of good Englishmen before and
since, 'Everybody wishes well to the King: but they would be
glad if his ministers were hanged. ' He abstained from public life
during the whole reign of William, but was an active tory member
of parliament under Anne, became one of the two famous 'panel
of peers, and was sent to the Tower by the Hanoverian govern-
ment; though afterwards, like others, he was, in a way, reconciled
by the good manners and good judgment of queen Caroline. But
Johnson thought him 'profane,' which, perhaps, he was sometimes,
and decided that his verses to ‘Myra' were commonly feeble and
unaffecting or forced and extravagant,' while his other little pieces
were ‘seldom either sprightly or elegant, either keen or weighty. '
They were 'trifles written in idleness and published by vanity. '
These are neat antitheses; but, if any one will look dispassionately
at the song 'Love is by Fancy led about' or at 'Thoughtful nights
and restless waking,' he will, with due historic allowance, hardly
think the judgment just in the present case. Granville came at an
unfortunate time in the history of the evolution of poetic species.
His wings had dwindled, and he could not quite fly; nor was he con-
tent merely to walk gracefully. But his lyre has not forgotten that,
in Joubert's famous phrase, it ought to be a 'winged instrument. '
Walsh was somewhat luckier: for his inheritance of the older
time was in the lighter vein, and, perhaps, the critical power
attributed to him, both by Dryden and by Pope, told him what not
to attempt, and not to attempt too much. His work in verse (to
which Johnson is somewhat kinder than he is to Lansdowne's) is
very small, but there are several pieces in it which are not any-
body's work. His couplets are distinctly good; except Garth's,
they are, perhaps, the best between Dryden and Pope. The poem
entitled Jealousy, in a rather elaborate stanza not ineffectively
composed of a decasyllabic quatrain, an octosyllabic couplet and
two 'fourteeners,' is far from contemptible. 'Caelia, too late you
would repent,' in Caroline common measure, has kept much of
the soar and swoop of that extraordinary example of anything
'common'; and, what is perhaps his best known and most praised
thing, The Despairing Lover, deserves all the praise and much
.
6


## p. 176 (#200) ############################################

176
Lesser Verse Writers
wider knowledge. The quaintness of its expression and of its
metre-a sort of regularised Skeltonic—is as crisp as it is quaint.
And when it is remembered that The Antidote, which begins
When I see the bright nymph who my heart does enthrall,
was probably written as early as anything by Prior, and, perhaps,
earlier still, it is difficult to be chary of applause. Walsh, a
country squire, a county member and, for a time, a placeman at
court-a man, too, who died in no very advanced middle age-can
only have written for his amusement; but he might have amused
himself very much worse.
A single paragraph must suffice for the quartette whom we
subjoin to these two. In Duke, Johnson found little to be praised,
.
and, in searches made at different times, the present writer has
found still less. The bulk of his work is translation, in which, as
elsewhere, he shows a certain ease. The absurd and, in fact,
almost meaningless commendation of Stepney, that his work 'made
grey authors blush'—which Johnson quotes without assigning its
author, but which he had printed elsewhere in its original context-
is the chief thing memorable about him. Yalden, as stout a tory as
Lansdowne, and a suspect about the time of Atterbury's fall, wrote
pindarics which are not the worst of that too generally bad kind,
and fables which, though unequal, are sometimes quite light and
good. Luckily for him, he did not, like Lansdowne, lay himself
open to the charge of “profanity,' and Lansdowne's censor has
given him high and detailed praise for a Hymn to Darkness,
apparently written in emulation of Cowley's Hymn to Light. It
is, fortunately, not in pindarics; though its stanza-a decasyllable,
two octosyllables and an alexandrine—is not very graceful. But
the present writer is quite unable to discover how and why
Thou dost thy smiles impartially bestow,
And knowest no difference here below;
All things appear the same by thee;
Though Light distinction makes, thou giv'st equality
is 'exquisitely beautiful. ' The last of the four, Dr William King,
though a rambling and unequal writer, is, perhaps, the most readable.
He wrote, in mixed verse and prose, The Art of Cookery, which is
,
quite interesting; one piece of his Orpheus and Eurydice, beginning
A roasted ant that's nicely done,
is familiar to all who were brought up on the old-fashioned
Speakers and Readers; humour and goodhumour abound in his


## p. 177 (#201) ############################################

The Later Group
177
work; he could turn little songs with a great deal of neatness;
and he contrives almost everywhere neither to offend nor to bore.
A second, and very much larger, division, which may, indeed,
perhaps with some sub-groupings, be made to include all the rest
of the poets to be dealt with in this section, consists of those verse-
writers who, though older than Pope, did not, for the most part,
publish poetry before the close of the seventeenth century, and who
represent the direct influence of Dryden, felt and exercised in
parallel measure with that felt by Pope himself; so that, in their
most characteristic work, they are of the queen Anne, or of the
earliest Georgian, division. These, for the most part, though they
may sometimes write pindarics, gravitate towards the couplet, and
occasionally towards blank verse; confine themselves, though they
do not abstain from lyric, to a few rather conventional forms of it;
and, when they are not attempting large, and generally ill-selected,
themes, approach very nearly to that 'paper of verses' which had
been contemptuously described in the generation before them.
Not a few of the later born of them, as well as many of those who
will be noticed in a subsequent chapter', make their appearance, if
not their first or only appearance, in that remarkable collection of
Dodsley, to which, accordingly, we must devote some direct atten-
tion as a whole. Some, such as Watts, have an abiding memory
for parts of their work, while the rest is absolutely forgotten.
Some, like Garth, have a place in the formal history of poetry
which ought to preserve them long after their theme has lost
whatever interest it may once have possessed. Others, like Black-
,
more, live in those ‘singing flames' of satire which at least ensure
an uncomfortable immortality. With the three just named, we
may begin.
The batch of writers previously reviewed, more or less, deserve
the politely contemptuous French epithet 'canary'; they seldom
attempted major themes, and, when they did, still more seldom
attacked them with the ‘horse, foot and artillery' of the long
poem. With the trio just mentioned, the case is altered. The
individual scale of Watts's pieces is, indeed, generally small; but
their tone is always serious. Garth's best known, or singly known,
work is, in design, burlesque; but the scale is considerable and the
plan involves stretches of treatment which are not burlesque at
all. Whatever may be said about Blackmore, two charges could
i See vol. x, chap. VII, post.
E. L. IX.
CH, VI.
12


## p. 178 (#202) ############################################

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Lesser Verse Writers
>
never be brought against him: that the manner of his versifications
was frivolous or that their bulk was insignificant.
Sir Richard Blackmore, though his exact birth year does not
seem to be known, took his M. A. degree at Oxford in 1676, and,
therefore-at the very earliest age of matriculation likely, even at
that time—must have been born nearer 1650 than 1660; so that he
may have been ten years older than Sir Samuel Garth, who was
born in 1661, and can hardly have been much less than twenty the
senior of Isaac Watts, the date of whose birth was 1674. But the
order of their poetical merit must, on almost any conceivable
system of criticism, be reversed.
Very few people, it may be suspected, are nowadays in a
position to give offhand any opinion based on knowledge of
Watts's actual quality as a poet. Watts's Hymns' (as Divine
Songs for Children and Moral Songs are commonly, but in-
correctly, called) early excluded his other work from notice, in
accordance with the curious doom which literary reputations
often have to undergo: and, while they themselves are probably
little known now, their old familiarity has left behind it a sort of
good humoured contempt to rest on the sluggard, and the little
busy bee and the everlastingly misquoted 'Let dogs delight. '
But, though there are some very pretty things among these
faded immortelles, and though Watts's quite exceptional command
of flexible and original metre is often shown in them, they are by
no means the only or the chief poetical documents of his pro-
ductivity. Whether against them, as against nearly all Watts's
work, Johnson's wellknown objection to sacred poetry will lie, must
be left to individual opinion. It might, perhaps, be argued, without
much danger of refutation, that the paucity of successes ought to
be set against the extravagant multitude of attempts by quite un-
qualified hands, and that the existence of any successes at all-
hardly to be denied in the face of a chain of verse from Dies Irae
to not a few of Christina Rossetti's pieces—bars too sweeping a
condemnation. Undoubtedly, the bulk, if not the whole body, of
Watts's Horae Lyricae comes under the censure, whether it be
just or unjust. Too much of this collection is in the perilous form
of 'pindaric,' and too much of this, again, succumbs to the special
dangers of turgidity and frigidity which beset that form. For strictly
impertinent and hopelessly disproportionate bombast, Watts’s
Elegy on Mr Thomas Gouge, which Southey has justly ridiculed,
is hardly outstripped by anything in the English language. Yet,
even here, amid the bombast and the bathos, occur phrases, and


## p. 179 (#203) ############################################

Isaac Watts. Sir Samuel Garth 179
a
6
a
even passages, which, by themselves, dissociated from their
subject, are unquestionable poetry.
Elsewhere, the faults are less and the merits more continuous.
The sapphics ‘When the fierce north wind with his airy forces,'
like nearly all English attempts at the metre before the last half
century, balance and pivot the rhythm wrongly; but there is, at
least, something grandiose about them, and, like Watts's other
things, they show a healthy reaction against the chilling uniformity
of the couplet. Watts was one of the earliest to try blank verse;
and few will think his essays without rhyme,' as he himself called
them, an item on the wrong side of his account. He was sometimes
very happy in the dangerous ‘short measure'-the old ‘poulters’
measure' split into four; and, in whatever form he writes, we shall
not accompany him far without (though, perhaps, in a rather different
sense) agreeing with Johnson himself that ‘his ear was well tuned
and his diction elegant and copious. ' Inferior as he may be to
Collins, he shows the same combat of time and man: while the
time is even more against him. And one cannot help speculating
on what he might have done if his floruit had coincided, not with
the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but with
that of the eighteenth and nineteenth.
There need be no such speculation in considering the cheerful,
craftsmanlike and, on its own schemes, almost fully adequate,
verse of Garth—during the whole of his life, it would seem, a
'prosperous gentleman,' in the full meaning of both adjective and
noun, though, perhaps, a little unlucky after his death. For Pope's
wellknown compliment of his being the best good Christian
without knowing it'shows the risk of having an epigrammatist for
a friend. His few minor pieces, Claremont, a poem of a place in
the Cooper's Hill style, some prologues, epilogues, dedications,
Kit-cat glass-pieces, and so forth, are well enough, but unimportant.
The Dispensary, Garth’s magnum opus (or opusculum majus)
obtains for him the description above awarded to his muse. It is
a burlesque, not so much in the manner of Macflecknoe (to which
Garth could not rise) as in the manner of Boileau's Lutrin; and its
subject is a quarrel between members of the college of physicians
about the supply of medicines to a dispensary established some years
before. The poem was very popular, and was frequently reprinted
during the author's life, always in a revised and enlarged form; the
alterations, as is not always the case, being, almost invariably, im-
provements. Like all pieces of the kind, it requires, perhaps, on the
i See vol. 1, chap. vii, post.
1242


## p. 180 (#204) ############################################

180
Lesser Verse Writers
part of posterity, a rather trying effort to understand its personal and
temporal allusions, situations and parodies. But, even as supply-
ing a sidelight on the ways of so exceptionally interesting a time as
that of William III and Anne may surely be called, it is valuable.
To the student of English literature and English poetry, however,
it has a far more cogent appeal. It represents, as a sort of practical
Ars Poetica or object lesson, the stage between Dryden and Pope,
and, without exaggeration, may be said to be the first draft-and
not a very rough first draft—of the couplet versification and the
poetic diction which were to dominate the whole eighteenth
century. There was nothing in Garth even distantly approaching
the genius of Dryden or the genius of Pope; but he had learnt from
Dryden all that Dryden could teach to a younger contemporary of
more than ordinary talent, and he anticipated Pope in most things
that did not require Pope's special gifts. The smooth running
couplets with a clinching stamp at the close; the well marked
pause in the centre of each line; the balanced epithets in the
respective halves, sometimes achieving epigram, but too frequently
tempting to‘pad'-all these things appear. And, in some passages,
such as Horoscope's flight to Teneriffe and the descent of Hygeia
to the shades, the method is shown almost within reach of its best,
though its defects, too, already appear.
There is, thus, no need of the courage or the callousness of a
'Swiss of Heaven' in making out a case for Watts or for Garth;
but what shall be said of Blackmore? The present writer has read
a great deal of Blackmore at different times, has recently re-read
some and believes that his knowledge, if not exhaustive, is, at least,
adequate. So far as it goes (and it extends even to Eliza, in part),
it certainly does not support Johnson's contention that Blackmore
has been exposed to worse treatment than he deserved; nor does it
-and, on this head, it is pretty complete-enable him to accept the
other dictum that Creation, if the poet had written nothing else,
would have transmitted him to posterity among the first favourites
of the English muse. Dismiss (most readers will not have much
difficulty in doing so) all thoughts of Arthur ('Prince' and 'King'),
Eliza, Alfred and the rest; allow nothing on the score that Black-
more's diploma-piece, which the respectable Mr Molyneux and the
great Mr Locke esteemed highly, consists of verses like
He spread the airy ocean without shores
Where birds are wafted by their feathered oars;
let Creation, which is easily accessible, count alone, with no bias,
for or against it, from the fact that the praises of Addison and


## p. 181 (#205) ############################################

Blackmore. The Spectator Division
181
Johnson, if not those of Molyneux and Locke, were evidently
secured by its decent orthodoxy—and in this work will be noticed
an absence of the positive absurdities with which Blackmore's other
poems abound; so that it will seem as if there were some foundation
for the curious story that Blackmore submitted the piece to a club
of wits, surely more complacent and more patient than wits usually
are, who corrected it almost line by line. It displays some argu-
mentative power : and the verse is not entirely devoid of vigour.
But the whole is a flat expanse of bare didactic; while its constant
attempt to cope directly with Lucretius adds exasperation to the
disappointed expectance of something even distantly approaching
the furor arduus of the enemy. The conclusion is that one must
alter Johnson's final verdict slightly. He says that 'whoever judges
of this by any other of Blackmore's performances will do it injury. '
We should say that, in order to enjoy or endure Creation, at least
one, and, if possible, more, of Blackmore's other performances
ought to have been mastered. The reader would then, at least,
feel how much worse Creation might have been.
Among the remaining verse-writers, a convenient sub-section
may be formed of those who belong more particularly to what
may be called the Spectator division-not that they were in all
cases contributors to that periodical, though some were—the two
Philipses, Edmund (or 'Rag') Smith, William Broome, Elijah
Fenton, John Hughes and Laurence Eusden? All these were in,
more or less, close connection with Addison, or Pope, or both; while,
to them, we may add, though they were outliers in this respect,
Joseph Trapp, who was born nearly as far back in the seventeenth
century as Addison, and much earlier than Pope, outlived even
the latter, and nearly reached the middle of the eighteenth ;
together with Henry Brooke, author of The Fool of Quality, who
was a poet before he was a novelist, and David Mallet, who,
to one doubtful, adds another certain, claim for something more
than catalogue rank. It is in this group that we reach what
we may call full eighteenth century character, with little or nothing
of the last age' in them. Yet it is most noticeable, and to be
missed only at the risk of missing, with it, the continuity of English
verse, that, in them, we find two notes of the future which, in some
degree, recall that last age itself. John Philips, long before
.
Thomson, and with hardly any predecessors except Roscommon,
reintroduced blank verse, the very Trojan horse of the citadel
1 As to Tickell see ante, pp. 170^-3.


## p. 182 (#206) ############################################

182
Lesser Verse Writers
of the couplet. Ambrose Philips, ‘Namby-Pamby'—the poet of
society verse far below Prior, of pastorals pastoralised to the most
artificial-trivial extent possible, of pale translations and second-
hand things in various rococo styles—introduces a second fatalis
machina, a machine more fatal than the former, in the shape of
the three volumes of Ballads published in 1723. And Mallet, in
William and Margaret, gives the first remarkable and influential
example of that ballad pastiche which has been disdained or
abused for a century past, but which, perhaps, was very much
more effective as a shoe-horn to draw on the romantic revival than,
to that age, would have been the genuine antiquities themselves.
John Philips, almost exactly a contemporary of Ambrose so
far as birth went, was an Oxford man of the Christ Church
set noteworthy at the junction of the centuries, and a tory;
while Ambrose was of St John's college, Cambridge, and a whig.
Although there does not seem to have been any personal enmity
between John Philips and Addison-indeed they had a common
intimacy through ‘Rag' Smith, and Addison praised The Splendid
Shilling highly-Philips, rather unluckily for himself, was chosen
to be pitted against Addison in celebrating Blenheim. The
burlesque of Milton in The Splendid Shilling is good humoured,
not in the least offensive, amusing and by no means critically
unjust; while the credit of the serious blank verse of Cyder (for
John Philips was the first wellknown writer after Milton to make
this metre his chief vehicle) need not depend on the certificate
received by Johnson from the great gardener and botanist’ Miller,
to the effect that there was more truth in it than in many prose
treatises on the same subject. Blenheim is that most terrible of
failures, an unconscious burlesque. But it must be remembered,
in Philips's excuse, first, that Milton's description of the battles
in Heaven is not exactly the finest art of Paradise Lost and,
secondly, that‘Rag' Smith’s regret at its not having been written in
Latin means more than it directly conveys. Undoubtedly, Philips
thought, the poem more in the way of a prize composition in a
learned language than as anything original and vernacular; and,
had he written it thus, it would probably, to retort and enlarge
Macaulay's sneering comparison, have been quite as good as most
of Silius Italicus, and perhaps not so very much worse than parts
of Lucan. As it is, the other two poems set men on the recovery
of one of the greatest instruments of English versification; and, if
he was the author of the 'Bacchanalian song' printed with them,
1 As to Ambrose Philips, see ante, pp. 165–6.
6


## p. 183 (#207) ############################################

6
Fenton. Broome. Edmund Smith 183
he gave some hints to the latest, and almost the best, of our
practitioners in that cheerful kind—Thomas Love Peacock.
Why Pope, in commiserating his own 'ten whole years' of
collaborative translation, should have been more unkind to William
Broome than to Elijah Fenton, when both were his collaborators,
has not, I believe, been discovered: for jealousy of superior scholar-
ship, the commonly imputed cause, would have applied to both.
Possibly there is no other reason than that one presents a convenient,
the other a very unlikely, rime. There is, indeed, said to have been
a contrast in temper-Broome being rough, in that respect, and
Fenton easy-going. But, what might hardly have been expected,
even had both been of amiable dispositions, the pair of lieutenants
were perfectly good friends. It is curious that both of them
attempted blank verse translations of Homer, though the only
permanent fame that either was to achieve was as coadjutors in
Pope's couplet-manufactory, and as 'hands' so skilled' that,
from the first, it was difficult to isolate the work of any of the
three by mere reading. Except for this connection with Pope and
for this early demonstration of the fatal facility of, at least, part
of his method, neither deserves much notice here. Both 'pindar-
ised'; both, in their lighter moods, tried the licensed levities of
octosyllabic tale and of lyric, more or less prim or arch. Both,
but especially Broome, exhibit, in their blank verse, that fatal
tendency to stiff and stopped central pauses which was to reach
its height in Glover. Johnson perceived, though admitting that
he could not define, a peculiarity in Fenton's versification ; but
the present writer, though somewhat to this manner used, has
neither discovered the secret-nor, indeed, the fact.
Edmund or 'Rag' Smith and John Hughes were both friends
of Addison. The first, whose Phaedra and Hippolitus bears about
the same relation to Phèdre as Philips's Distressed Mother does to
Andromaque, was a typical example of the ne'er-do-well scholar.
His work has smuggled itself into The British Poets ; but the
assistance of his friends and the long suffering of his college could
not profit him, and his loose living carried him off before he
experienced actual want. He must have had real humour-his
Latin analysis of Pocock is one of the best things of the kind;
and Addison's reply to his objection “What am I to do with Lord
Sunderland ? ' (Smith being asked to write a whig History of the
Revolution) When were you drunk last, Rag? ' is singularly defective
in moral logic. The absurd panegyric of Oldisworth (in his memoir
of Smith), cited by Johnson, ought not to be reckoned against wits


## p. 184 (#208) ############################################

184
Lesser Verse Writers
7
which everyone seems to have acknowledged. But he has left us
hardly any material for deciding whether he could have been a
poet had he chosen. John Hughes put in more documents. That
he edited, and showed some, though no complete, appreciation of
Spenser, does not bring him within our range, but near it. It is
noteworthy that Addison actually thought of him as a collaborator in
Cato; and his own selection of the subject of his Siege of Damascus
from so unusual a quarter as the early history of Islam argues
a really poetical taste! Nor is it absolutely necessary to accept
Swift's decision that Hughes was among the mediocrists,' and
Pope's that he wanted genius. ' They were not altogether in the
wrong; but this chapter is a chapter of 'mediocrists,' and there
are things in Hughes's verse which neither Pope nor Swift was
very well qualified to recognise. The contents' of it would read
not unlike those of Broome's and Fenton's; but the quality is
sometimes superior. He seems to have been a special admirer
and follower of Dryden's lyrical work, which he was even unwise
enough sometimes to refashion, and he has succeeded in catching
something, if not much, of that touch of the older magic which
Dryden's lyre could give forth.
The members of a trio also named above, if not exactly great
in themselves, belong to gentes paullo majores in poetry. Joseph
Trapp was not only the first professor of poetry at Oxford, and,
thus, possibly, the first professor of English literature in England,
as well as the author of discourses on the subject which have solid
critical merit; but he was a practical craftsman, if not exactly
an artist in verses, and the author of one member of a most
famous pair of epigrams ; concerning which it is, perhaps, not
improper to remark that, as he was actually incorporated at
Cambridge, mere inter-university jealousy could have nothing to
do with the matter. The eccentric author of The Fool of Quality,
Henry Brooke, was a poet long before he published that strange
compound of genius and dulness. There were full thirty years
between it and Universal Beauty-his longest and best known,
though by no means his earliest or his best, work, in verse. This
philosophical poem is of a kind of which More and his group had
set the fashion in the seventeenth century, and which was taken up
in its own modes by the eighteenth. It has only to be compared
with Blackmore's much more belauded Creation—to which, in
subject, it is partly akin-in order to see the immense improvement
1 As to Hughes's dramatic work, cf. ante, vol. VIII, p. 194.


## p. 185 (#209) ############################################

Henry Brooke.
David Mallet
185
of form which Pope, who is said to have actually bestowed on
it some revision, had brought about, as well as the fine talents
of the younger writer. It is more scientific than theological,
though by no means atheistic or even deistic. Indeed, Brooke,
in his latter days, was reputed a 'methodist ? . ' An attempt to
translate Tasso, also in couplet, is but ineffectual, and a condensation
of Chaucer's Man of Laro's Tale sinks far below the comparative
inadequacy of Dryden in such things, while it has nothing of his
positive excellence. Brooke also wrote Fables, in which he ex-
hibits a fair knack at using the easy octosyllables in whose undress
the century at large took refuge from the panoply of the heroic.
A very curious piece called Conrade, purporting to be an ancient
Irish legend, can hardly be without obligations to Macpherson-
unless, indeed, it is the other way. But Brooke has confined
himself, so far as form goes, to constantly redundant heroic lines.
And the songs interspersed in his play are more than fairly suc-
cessful when they are light, and not always a failure when they are
serious. Over all his work-verse and prose-there is, indeed, a
curious atmosphere of frittered and wasted talent, sometimes
approaching genius. But, in his later days, he was, at least par-
tially, insane: and whether he had been wholly sane at any time
may, perhaps, be doubted.
On the other hand, though very harsh things have been said of
David Malloch, who, for prudential reasons, changed his name to
Mallet, just as his father, a Macgregor, had already changed his to
Malloch during the outlawry of the clan, there never has been
the slightest doubt about his sanity. The transactions of his life
which made him most notorious, his reception of Sarah duchess of
Marlborough's legacy for writing the life of her husband, and his
neglect to perform the duty imposed ; his still more famous accept-
ance of hire from Bolingbroke to libel Pope after his death ; and
his much more defensible share in the attack on Byng—these do
not concern us here. But, to say, as Johnson says, that there is
no species of composition in which he was eminent' is merely to
exclude, as Johnson doubtless did, the one species in which he was
very eminent indeed. William and Margaret, written as early as
1723 is, of course, to some extent, a pastiche of older ballads and
of snatches of Elizabethan song. But the older ballads themselves
were always, more or less, pastiches of each other. And, if the
piece had some creditors, it had many more debtors; nor does any
single copy of verses deserve so much credit for setting the
1 As to his relation to the mystical movement see chap. XII, post.
6


## p. 186 (#210) ############################################

186
Lesser Verse Writers
eighteenth century back on the road of true romantic poetry by
an easy path, suited to its own tastes and powers. As to Rule,
Britannia, modern criticism has usually been inclined to assign
it rather to Thomson than to Mallet, though the two undoubtedly
collaborated in the play wherein it appeared. But, to tell the
truth, the merit of the piece lies rather in the music and the
sentiment than in the poetry. Mallet's more ambitious poems
Amyntor and Theodora, The Excursion, etc. are of little value;
but the song gift of William and Margaret reappears in The
Birks of Endermay (better known as Invermay). Edwin and
Emma, once as well known as either and, perhaps, also possessing
some schoolmaster virtue, is vastly inferior to William and
Margaret.
Before turning to the numerus numeri—the tail of the list of
these things seldom rich or rare, but somehow, ambered in literary
history-we must deal with one who, at some times, and to not a
few persons, would have seemed worthy of a much more dignified
a
place in the story. But, to the present writer, Richard Savage is
as mediocre a mediocrist as Swift could possibly have found among
his own contemporaries. The famous romance of his birth and
maltreatment seems to be now almost unanimously disbelieved
by historical critics : and, though his memory must always retain
the great and inalienable privilege of Johnson's friendship, and of
the Life which that friendship prompted, these can add nothing
to his individual and intrinsic literary value. On the other hand,
neither is it affected by the circumstance that, apart from
Johnson's testimony to his friend, and even from some dropped
hints in that testimony, we should be apt to think him an
impostor, a libeller and something of a ruffian. We have only
to do with the works; and, when we turn to them, what do we
find? The Wanderer may not be the worst of the descriptive
didactic verse-tractates of its century; but, to the usual enquiry
whether, as poems, they have any particular reason for existence,
and the usual answer in the negative, there has to be added, in
this case, the discovery that it has really no plan at all, and (the
words are Johnson's own, and the sentiment is not denied by him) is
a 'heap of shining materials thrown together by accident. ' But we
must ask, further, 'Do the materials really shine ? ' and, if so, 'with
what sort of lustre ? ' The answer, one fears, must be, 'With that of
tinsel at best. ' The Bastard has a false air of pathos and indig-
nation which will not survive careful reading. Neither passion
nor poetry, but merely rhetoric, supplies the phrasing; and, long


## p. 187 (#211) ############################################

Savage. Duck. Hill
187
before you reach the end of the poem, you have been prepared to
find it turn into a begging letter to queen Caroline. The Volunteer
Laureat odes to the same royal personage are fully exposed to the
stock satire on the regularly commissioned utterances of that kind
of muse; and the lesser pieces are quite insignificant. One famous
line of The Bastard
No tenth transmitter of a foolish face
is not uncommonly attributed to Pope ; and, perhaps, ignorance
has here hit upon the truth, for Pope was very good to Savage.
But it might well be a 'windfall of the Muses' to anyone who,
with his wits about him—and Savage certainly had his-had read
either Pope himself, or, better still, Dryden.