author's duty. Churchill now lies neglected, for posterity will only respect those who

"File off the mortal part

Of glowing thought with Attic art."

Young. I have heard that this careless bard, after a successful work, usually precipitated the publication of another, relying on its crudeness being passed over by the public curiosity excited by its better brother. He called this getting double pay, for thus he secured the sale of a hurried work. But Churchill was a spendthrift of fame, and enjoyed all his revenue while he lived; posterity owes him little, and pays him nothing!-DISKAELI, ISAAC, 1791-1824, Literary Composition, Curiosities of Literature.

however erroneously, imagine that he was justified in the language which he used? Who is there that believes the stupidity and worthlessness of every individual who suffered under the lash of Dryden and Pope; yet who ever thought that Dryden and Pope ought to be accused of wilful falsehood? With respect to Churchill, there is this powerful fact on his side, that bribes and preferments were vainly offered to purchase his silence; and he who resists such inducements is not likely to be a man who has "little veneration for truth!" He may be a mistaken fanatic, but he must be an honest one.-DAVENPORT, R. A., 1822, The British Poets, Chiswick, ed., vol. LXI, Life, p. 25.

Of him it was said by one greater far, that he "blazed the meteor of a season." For four years—during life—his popularity in London and the suburbs-was prodigious; for forty-and that is a long

time after death-he was a choice classic

est merit, and confer on his writings the atticism which preserves them.-TAYLOR, WILLIAM, 1804, Critical Review, May.

The powers of Churchill have been unable to protect him from the oblivion into which his poems are daily sinking, owing to the ephemeral interest of political subjects, and his indolent negligence of severe study and regularity.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1805, The Life of John Dryden.

Churchill's Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subjects deserved: they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of hardened assurance.-HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lectures on the English Poets, Lecture vi.

Churchill may be ranked as a satirist immediately after Pope and Dryden, with perhaps a greater share of humour than either. He has the bitterness of Pope, with less wit to atone for it; but no mean share of the free manner and energetic plainness of Dryden.-CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

That many of the objects of Churchill's satire were morally and politically obnoxious to it, few will have the hardihood to deny. That some of them were too severely treated, we may admit; but where is the proof that Churchill did not,

in the libraries of aging or aged men of wit upon town; and now, that nearly a

horrid hair shook pestilence and war" o'er slaves and Scotsmen, tools and tyrants, peers, poetasters, priests, pimps, and players, his name is still something more than a mere dissyllable, and seems the shadow of the sound that Mother dullness was wont to whisper in her children's ears when fretting wakefully on her neglected breasts. . There is an air of power in his way of attacking any and every subject. He goes to work without embarrassment, with spirit and ease, and is presently in his matter, or in some matter, rarely inane. It is a part, and a high part of genius, to design; but he was destitute of invention. The selfdubbed champion of liberty and letters, he labours ostentatiously and energetically in that vocation; and in the midst of tumultuous applause, ringing round a career of almost uninterrupted success, he seldom or never seems aware that the

duties he had engaged himself to perform

In

to his country and his kind-were far beyond his endowments-above his conception. His knowledge either of books or men was narrow and superficial. no sense had he ever been a student. best thoughts are all essentially commonplace; but, in uttering them, there is almost always a determined plainness of

His

words, a free step in verse, a certain boldness and skill in evading the trammel of the rhyme, deserving high praise; while often, as if spurning the style which yet does not desert him, he wears it clinging about him with a sort of disregarded grace.-WILSON, JOHN, 1845, Supplement to Mac-Fleenoe and the Dunciad, Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 58, pp. 372, 373.

It is not by the indifferent qualities in his works that Charles Churchill should be, as he has too frequently been, condemned. Judge him at his best; judge him by the men he followed in this kind of composition; and his claim to the respectful and enduring attention of the students of English poetry and literature, becomes manifest indeed. Of the gross indecencies of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, he has none. He never, in any one instance, that he might fawn upon power or trample upon weakness, wrote licentious lampoons. There was not a form of mean pretence, or servile assumption, which he did not denounce. Low, pimping politics, he abhorred and that their vile abettors, to whose exposure his works are so incessantly devoted, have not carried him into utter oblivion with themselves, sufficiently argues for the sound morality and permanent truth expressed in his manly verse. He indulged too much in personal invective, as we have said; and invective is too apt to pick up, for instant use against its adversaries, the first heavy stone that lies by the wayside, without regard to its form or fitness. -FORSTER, JOHN, 1845-55, Charles Churchill, p. 54. Churchill's opinions are worth attending to, though he expresses them with vehemence, and by wholesale.-HUNT, LEIGH, 1848, The Town, p. 294.

Churchill, by want and rage impell'd to write,

Whose muse was anger, and whose genius spite,

With satire meant to stab, and not to heal,
The morbid, bloated, feverish commonweal;
Too proud to yield to humble virtue's rule,
Smote half the world with reckless ridicule.
Wit, honour, sense, to him did Heaven im-
part,

But not the last, best gift, a pious heart.
He blazed awhile in fortune, fame, and pride,
But unrespected lived, untimely died.

-COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1849, Sketches of English Poets, Poems, vol. II, p. 303.

Perhaps the writer who, if not by what

he did himself, yet by the effects of his example, gave the greatest impulse to our poetry at this time, was Churchill. . . . If we put aside Thomson, Churchill, after all deductions, may be pronounced, looking to the quantity as well as the quality of his productions, to be the most considerable figure that appears in our poetry in the half-century from Pope to Cowper. But that is, perhaps, rather to say little for the sald half-century than much for Churchill.-CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. II, p. 305.

Was of the blood of the Juvenals and Drydens, though a poor relation as it were; and with all his carelessness, roughness, and even common-place, has those brilliant flashes of insight, and spontaneous felicities of expression, by which every true critic at once distinguishes the man of natural power from the man of mere cultivation. He rarely gives perfect satisfaction to the student, and never long-continued satisfaction; but the kind of pleasure he gives in his best moments is akin to that given by the greatest writers of his kind. There are some who, with less dross, turn out worse metal. Churchill is frequently dull, but never mediocre; and if he is wearisome in one paragraph, is as likely as not to make up for it by being wonderful in the next. All satirists, it has been said, take with more or less directness either after Horace or Juvenal. Churchill is a Juvenalian; a suckling of the Roman wolf; fierce but jolly; savage yet not unkindly. course, too, he has points in common with all the great satirists, for they have the distant likenesses of a clan as well as the nearer likenesses of a family. He has the Aristophanic heartiness, though not the Aristophanic poetry; the good-fellowship of Horace, with far less subtlety and familiar grace; a good deal of Dryden's vigour and eye for the points of a satirical portrait, but inferior penetration of glance, and far less comprehensive sweep, whether of reasoning power, poetic humour, or fancy.-HANNAY, JAMES, 1866, ed., The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, Memoir, p. xxx.

Of

He had a surprising extemporary vigour of mind; his praise carries great weight of blow; he undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as Cowper says of him, in

a certain rude and earth-born vigor; but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and without danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a good life on the books of the Critical Insurance Office. "It is not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by the side of Virgil?" cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wit's end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be also the great Mantuan's art, his power, not only of being strong in parts, but of making these parts coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it. LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1866-90, Carlyle; Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. II, p. 80.

Churchill was a man of much generous impulse; and the reader can still enjoy the vigour of many passages in his poems, although their absolute subjectmatter, combined with their length, is a bar to general perusal now-a-days.ROSSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1872, ed., Humourous Poems, p. 226.

Churchill was inspired by both the motives which, according to the two great Latin satirists, are the parents of satire; but his indignation did not burn with the pure flame of Juvenal, and his impecuniosity, unlike the honorable poverty of Horace, was the child of his vices. Writing to live, he did not write so that his works should live after him. Dashing off a poem a month, in order to catch perennial stream of half-crowns from his eager and insatiable readers, he vehemently declared that to blot, prune, or correct was like the cutting-away of his own flesh. "Little of books, and little known of men, When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen; Rough as they run, the ready thoughts set down;

Rough as they run, discharge them on the town."

With his quiver of darts so unpolished that they could not escape the rust, tipped with venom that long ago had lost its sting, Churchill, "the scourge of bad men, and hardly better than the very worst," easily and rapidly stormed in his lifetime the citadel of Fame, but he was not of those whose names are engraved upon its bulwarks.-TREVELYAN, GEORGE OTTO, 1880, The Early History of Charles James Fox, p. 149.

The celebrity of the smart verse making of Churchill marks a low point in English taste. It nearly secured him a poet's monument in Westminster Abbey; and it actually secured a poet's rank for a petulant rhymer without a spark of the poet's imagination, of cold heart, natural bad taste, and very little knowledge of that narrow world which he so impudently lampooned. Nothing in Churchill reveals a gleam of genial feeling, or justifies the suspicion that he could take any pleasure in what refines or elevates. If we may believe his own account of himself, nature had given him little enough, beyond an ugly face, a sour temperament and a bitter tongue. Yet he was not dissatisfied. He was very willing to be taken for what he was and if he could not win liking and respect, he was content to be feared. In all this there must have been something of affectation. Yet it is only too clear that the coarse texture of his mind was impermeable to the kindlier and worthier influences of his time. . . . Cowper,

we know, had a real admiration for him. His earliest work the "Rosciad," is his best, because in it he most adhered to good models. His later works will serve the student as a rich mine of all sorts of errors in taste and judgment. In proportion as he abandoned himself to his own guidance, his work degenerated, and the poverty of his thought appeared; and in three years he had literally written himself out. But in all that he wrote there is a certain fierce manliness which wins attention, and even sympathy for his untutored brain and unsoftened heart, and this effect is heightened by the story of his life and death. -PAYNE, E. J., 1880, The English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. III, pp. 389, 391.

The satirist who towered for a moment so high above his contemporaries, and who leaves upon us the same impression of greatness as a knock-kneed giant at a country fair may leave. The Rev. Charles Churchill (1731-1764) has faded to the merest shadow of himself, and the writer who of all others aimed at being virile, robust, and weighty, has come to be regarded as the ideal of a pasteboard hero. . . . Feared and admired for his force, with his tempest of uncouth and vituperative verse, his rattling facility, and his reckless swaggering courage to support him,

an attractive

Personally Dodsley is figure. Johnson had ever a kindly feeling for his "patron," and thought he deserved a biography. His early condition lent a factitious importance to some immature verse, and his unwearied endeavours for literary fame gained him a certain contemporary fame. Some of his songs have merit-"One kind kiss before we part" being still sung-and the epigram on the words "one Prior" in Burnet's "History" is well known. As a bookseller he showed remarkable enterprise and business aptitude, and his dealings were conducted with liberality and integrity. He deserves the praise of Nichols as "that admirable patron and encourager of learning." TEDDER, H. R., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. xv, p. 173.

GENERAL

The first edition of the present volumes was one of the many excellent plans produced by the late Mr. Robert Dodsley; a man to whom literature is under so many obligations that it would be unpardonable to neglect this opportunity of informing those who may have received any pleasure from the work, that they owe it to a person whose merit and abilities raised him from an obscure situation in life to affluence and independence.-REED, ISAAC, 1780, ed., Select Collection of Old Plays.

His plan of republishing "Old English Plays" is said to have been suggested to him by the literary amateur Coxeter, but the execution of it leaves us still indebted to Dodsley's enterprise. - CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

"Dodsley's Collection" turned out to be a chance "medley:" unskilled in the language and the literature and the choice of his dramatists, he, as he tells us, "by the assistance of a little common sense, set a great number of these passages right; that is, the dramatist of the dull "Cleone" brought down the ancient genius to his own; and, if he became intelligible, at least he was spurious. If, after all, some parts were left unintelligible, the reader must consider how many such

remain in Shakespeare.-DISRAELI, ISAAC, 1841, Shakespeare, Amenities of Literature. Good DODSLEY honest, bustling, hearty soul, A foot-man, verse-man, prose-man, bibliopole;

A menial first beneath a lady's roof,
Then Mercury to guttling Dartineuf,
His humble education soon complete,
He learnt good things to write, good things

to eat.

Then boldly ventured on the buskin'd stage, And show'd how toys may help to make us sage:

Nay, dared to bite the great with satire's tooth,

And made a Miller tell his King the truth.
In tragic strain he told Cleone's woes,
The touching sorrows and the madd'ning
throes

Of a fond mother and a faithful wife.
He wrote "The Economy of Human Life."
For flights didactic then his lyre he strung,
Made rhymes on Preaching, and blank verse
on Dung;

Anon with soaring weary, much at his ease,
Wrote Epigrams, and Compliments, and
Kisses.

All styles he tried, the tragic, the comic, lyric,

The grave didactic and the keen satiric; Now preach'd and taught as sober as a dominie,

Now went pindaric-mad about Melpomene;
Now tried the pastoral pipe and oaten stop,
Yet all the while neglected not his shop.
Fair be his fame, among a knavish clan
His noblest title was an honest man.
A bookseller, he robb'd no bard of pelf,
No bard he libell'd, though a bard himself.

COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1849, Sketches of English Poets, Poems, vol. II, p. 307.

many branches, but among all his producDodsley attempted literary fame in tions nothing is so well known as his "Select Collection of Old Plays," 1744, dedicated to Sir Clement Cotterel Dormer, who probably contributed some of its contents. The great ladies who first patronised Dodsley had not forgotten him, and the subscription list displays a host of aristocratic names. The art of collation was then unknown, and when he first undertook the work the duties of an editor of other than classical literature were not so well understood as in more recent times. . His most important commercial achievement was the foundation of the "Annual Register" in 1758, which is still published.-TEDDER, H. R., 1888, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XV. pp. 171, 172.