however, without some regret, behold those talents so capable of giving pleasure to all, exerted on efforts that, at best, can amuse only the few; we cannot behold this rising poet seeking fame among the learned, without hinting to him the same advice that Isocrates used to give his scholars, study the people." Vol. xvii. p. 239.

The two burlesque odes were reviewed in the same journal at great length, and with due praise, for they are excellent of their kind,—but on the kind itself, there are these just remarks:-"This way of reciting and wresting the verses of truly respectable writers, is at best but a kind of literary mimickry; the success of which considerably depends on the copy's being exaggerated beyond the original, by an injurious resemblance, sometimes termed outré by the French; while it attempts to interest us also, from that excess of self-love, which too generally disposes a man to depreciate the excellence of another in any art or faculty, to which he forms pretensions himself. Nevertheless not to urge these suggestions beyond what the present occasion will strictly bear, we do not suppose our ingenious bard was actuated by sheer acrimony, or an arugo mera, as Horace strongly expresses it, against his eminent poetical brethren here; but we rather conjecture, that an ardent sprightly imagination, joined to some consciousness of his own faculties and attainments, has excited him to the present lusus ingenii, cum tantillo invidiæ. In this view it will appear tolerably venial, if we consider how far juvenile emulation may operate, and recollect, as some writer pleasantly expresses it, that wits are game cocks to one another.'

"We are conscious of having allowed more room to this article, than we generally do to those on such short performances and chiefly, because the contention of rival wits and poets has often something so entertaining, as to engage the attention of the literary, the poetical, and elegant, who, we suppose, constitute a great proportion of our readers. But we shall conclude with hinting to our mettlesome ode-writer, upon the whole, that the most pardonable, the most creditable way of lowering his overtowering brethren, is to excel them. And whenever he has attained this glorious, because difficult, supereminence, let him watch his own demeanour so assiduously, as to give no occasion to the genus irritabile, the poetical hornets, to object that very pride and superciliousness to him, which he has ridiculed, and, we hope, intended to reform, in others."Vol. xxiii. p. 57-63. July, 1760.

Foote's Personalities, p. 47.—The last editor of Churchill's poems (in 1804) has offered a most insufficient apology for this part of Foote's conduct. "His exposing living characters on the stage," says this gentleman, "has been much censured; but we cannot help thinking, that authors of this kind are in some respects more useful to the age in which they live, than those who only range abroad into the various scenes of life for general character." As if this were any excuse for holding up the harmless weaknesses or peculiarities of a private individual to public ridicule !

Excesses which Churchill braved in the strength of a robust frame, p. 63. 'For me let Galen moulder on the shelf;

I'll live, and be physician to myself.

Whilst soul is joined to body, whether fate

Allot a longer or a shorter date,

I'll make them live as brother should with brother,
And keep them in good humour with each other.

"The surest road to health, say what they will,
Is-never to suppose we shall be ill.

Most of those evils we poor mortals know,
From doctors and imagination flow.
Hence to old women with your boasted rules,
Stale traps, and only sacred now to fools!
As well may sons of physic hope to find
One medicine, as one hour for all mankind.

"If Rupert after ten is out of bed,

The fool, next morning, can't hold up his head.
What reason this which me to bed must call,
Whose head, thank Heaven! never aches at all?
In different courses different tempers run;
He hates the moon; I sicken at the sun.
Wound up at twelve at noon, his clock goes right;
Mine better goes wound up at twelve at night."
Night, v. 69-84.

Lloyd alludes to this passage in some lines which seem to imply that he could not follow his friend's course with impunity.

66 Wits

live a life of imitation,
Are slovens, revellers, and brutes,
Laborious, absent, prattlers, mutes,
From some example handed down
Of some great genius of renown.
"If Addison, from habit's trick,
Could bite his fingers to the quick,
Shall not I nibble from design,
And be an Addison to mine?
If Pope most feelingly complains
Of aching head, and throbbing pains,
My head and arm his posture hit,
And I already ache for wit.

If Churchill, following Nature's call,
Has head that never aches at all;'
With burning brow and heavy eye,
I'll give my looks and pain the lie."

Epistle to a Friend who sent the Author a Hamper of Wine.

St. James's Mag. Oct. 1763.

Poor Lloyd, by his own confession, played the rake with a heavy heart. No man knew better than Churchill that the art of poetry requires no ordinary pains, p. 64.

How much mistaken are the men who think
That all who will without restraint may drink;
May largely drink, ev'n till their bowels burst,
Pleading no right but merely that of thirst,
At the pure waters of the living well,

Beside whose streams the Muses love to dwell!
Verse is with them a knack, an idle toy,
A rattle gilded o'er, on which a boy

May play untaught, whilst, without art or force,
Make it but jingle, music comes of course.

Little do such men know the toil, the pains,
The daily, nightly, racking of the brains,
To range the thoughts, the matter to digest,
To cull fit phrases, and reject the rest ;

To know the times when humour on the cheek

Of mirth may hold her sports; when wit should speak,
And when be silent; when to use the powers

Of ornament, and how to place the flowers,
So that they neither give a tawdry glare,
"Nor waste their sweetness in the desert air;"
To form, (which few can do,—and scarcely one,
One critic in an age, can find when done,)
To form a plan, to strike a grand outline,
To fill it up, and make the picture shine

A full and perfect piece; to make coy rhyme
Renounce her follies, and with sense keep time;
To make proud sense against her nature bend,
And wear the chains of rhyme, yet call her friend.

Gotham, b. ii. v. 1-22.

The St. James's Magazine, p. 65.-Lloyd's declaration of what his Magazine was not to contain, shows what were the usual attractions of such publications at that time.

No pictures taken from the life,
Where all proportions are at strife;
No humming-bird, no painted flower,
No beast just landed at the Tower;
No wooden notes, no coloured map,
No country-dance shall stop a gap.
O, Philomath, be not severe
If not one problem meets you here,
Where gossip A and neighbour B
Pair, like good friends, with C and D,
And E F G, H I J join,

And curve and incidental line

Fall out, fall in, and cross each other,

Just like a sister and a brother.

Ye tiny poets, tiny wits,

Who frisk about on tiny tits,

Who words disjoin, and sweetly sing,
Take one third part, and take the thing,
Then close the joints again to frame
Some lady's or some city's name;
Enjoy your own, your proper Phoebus;
We neither make nor print a rebus.
No crambo, no acrostic fine,
Great letters lacing down each line;
No strange conundrum, no invention
Beyond the reach of comprehension;
No riddle, which whoe'er unties,
Claims twelve MUSEUMS for the PRIZE,
Shall strive to please you at the expense
Of simple taste and common sense.

Charles Denis, p. 66.-The Monthly Review (April, 1754), noticing Denis's Select Fables in Verse, says, "In regard to his versification, it is not unaptly characterized by what Mr. Congreve observed of the Pindariques of his time; as being a bundle of rambling incoherent thoughts, expressed in a like parcel of irregular stanzas, which also consist of such another complication of disproportioned, uncertain, and perplexed verses and rhymes.'

Congreve's just description could not have been more unaptly applied. The reviewers have entirely overlooked the subject-matter of the poems. and the key in which the metre was pitched.

Lloyd thus characterizes Denis more fairly, though too favourably.
Originals will always please;

And copies too, if done with ease.
Would not old Plautus wish to bear,
Turn'd English host, an English air,
If Thornton, rich in native wit,
Would make the modes and diction fit?
Or, as I know you hate to roam,-
To fetch an instance nearer home;
Though in an idiom most unlike,
A similarity must strike,
Where both, of simple nature fond,
In art and genius correspond;
And naïve both (allow the phrase,
Which no one English word conveys)
Wrap up their stories neat and clean;
Easy as-

FRIEND.

Denis's you mean.
The very man,-not mere translation,
But La Fontaine by transmigration.
AUTHOR.

Authors, as Dryden's maxim runs,
Have what he calls poetic sons.
Thus Milton, more correctly wild,
Was richer Spenser's lawful child;

And Churchill, got on all the Nine,
Is Dryden's heir in every line.
Thus Denis proves his parents plain,
The child of Ease and La Fontaine.

St. James's Mag. vol. i. p. 380.

A Poem in the St. James's Magazine, probably by Cowper, p. 67.

AN ODE.

SECUNDUM ARTEM.

1.

Shall I begin with Ah, or Oh!

Be sad? Oh! yes. Be glad? Ah! no.
Light subjects suit not grave Pindaric ode,
Which walks in metre down the Strophic road.
But let the sober matron wear

Her own mechanic sober air:

Ah me! ill suits, alas! the sprightly jig,
Long robes of ermine, or Sir Cloudsley's wig.
Come, placid Dulness, gently come,
And all my faculties benumb;

Let thought turn exile, while the vacant mind
To trickie words and pretty phrase confin'd,
Pumping for trim description's art,
To win the ear, neglects the heart.
So shall thy sister Taste's peculiar sons,
Lineal descendants from the Goths and Huns.
Struck with the true and grand sublime
Of rythm converted into rime,

Court the quaint muse, and con her lessons o'er,
Where sleep the sluggish waves by Granta's shore:
There shall each poet pare and trim,

Stretch, cramp, or lop the verse's limb,
While rebel Wit beholds them with disdain.
And Fancy flies aloft, nor heeds their servile chain.

2.

Oh, Fancy, bright aërial maid!

Where have thy vagrant footsteps stray'd?
For, Ah! I miss thee 'midst thy wonted haunt,
Since silent now th' enthusiastic chaunt,
Which erst like frenzy roll'd along,
Driv'n by th' impetuous tide of song;
Rushing secure where native genius bore,
Not cautious coasting by the shelving shore.
Hail to the sons of modern Rime,
Mechanic dealers in sublime,

Whose lady Muse full wantonly is dress'd
In light expressions quaint, and tinsel vest,
Where swelling epithets are laid
(Art's ineffectual parade)