not a little angry, and that they were bent on doing mischief. The satire is daringly personal and not unfrequently coarse, going to a much greater length in both ways than our present manners would allow. The vindictive spirit out of which it comes, too, is shown both by the pertinacity with which the more eminent victims are again and again attacked, and by the eagerness with which the smaller game also are hunted down and torn to pieces. Nobody escapes, from the new premier down to the most nameless among his retainers. Yet all this is done, as we have said, with much gaiety and laughter; and the epigrams are often as brilliant as they are stinging and exasperating. The Rolliad was followed, first by a small volume of Political Eclogues, and then by the Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, published after the election of Thomas Warton to that office on the vacancy occasioned by the death of William Whitehead. The Odes, which are supposed to be recited by their respective authors before the Lord Chamberlain, assisted by his friend Mr. Delpini, of the Haymarket Theatre, whom his lordship had sent for to serve as a guide to his inexperience in such matters, are assigned to Sir Cecil Wray, a not very literary M.P., the established butt of the Whig wits of those days--(“the words by Sir Cecil Wray, Bart., the spelling by Mr. Grojan, attorney-at-law," is the title); to Lord Mulgrave, a member of the new administration, and the author of a Voyage to the North Pole, as well as of various fugitive pieces in not the soberest verse; to Sir Joseph Mawbey, another ministerial M.P., who appears to have dealt, not in poetry, but in pigs; to Sir Richard Hill, the methodistical baronet, brother of Rowland, the wellknown preacher, and said to be given to the same kind of pious jocularity in his speeches with which Rowland used to enliven his sermons; to James Macpherson, the translator or author of Ossian, who was also at this time a member of the House of Commons (sitting as one of the representatives of the Nabob of Arcot); to Mason, the poet; to the Attorney-General, R. T. Arden (afterwards Lord Alvanley); to Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, already famous for having, as it was said, run over all the countries of the world, and learned nothing but their names; to Sir Gregory Page Turner, another loyal baronet and M.P.; to Michael Angelo Taylor, M.P.; to Major John Scott, Warren Hastings's chief agent and champion in the House of Commons; to Harry Dundas (in Scotch); to Dr. Joseph Warton," in

humble imitation of Brother Thomas ;" to Viscount Mountmorres (in Hibernian English); to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow; to the Rev. Dr. Prettyman (Pitt's tutor, afterwards Bishop of Winchester), the prose notes to whose irregular strains, "except those wherein Latin is concerned," are stated to be by John Robinson, Esq., the notorious "Jack Robinson," in popular repute the well-rewarded and unscrupulous doer of all work for all administrations; to the Marquess of Graham (the late Duke of Montrose); to Lord Mountmorres (a second attempt, in English); to Sir George Howard, K.B. (afterwards Field Marshal); to Dr. Markham, Archbishop of York; and to Warton himself, the successful candidate. The Probationary Odes proceeded from the same manufactory as the Rolliad; and they are at least equally spirited and successful. Indeed, the humour, we should say, is richer as well as brighter and freer in its flow, an effect owing partly perhaps to the form of the composition, which is not so solemn and rigid, but somewhat, also, probably, to the writers being in a kindlier mood, and less disposed to give pain to the objects of their satire. Except in a small collection of Political Miscellanies in the same style, which appeared shortly afterwards, the muse of the Rolliad and the Probationary Odes was, as far as is known, heard no more; but another mocking spirit, not to be so soon silenced, was already in the air, and beginning to "syllable men's names" in a very peculiar accent, at once singularly comic and biting. Dr. John Wolcot, formerly a preacher to a congregation of negroes in Jamaica, now settled in London as a physician, made his first appearance as Peter Pindar in his Lyric Odes [fifteen in number] to the Royal Academicians, for 1782. The style and manner of these compositions, coarse and careless enough, but full of drollery and pungency, and quite original, seems to have taken the public fancy at once. Some attention also their author would have had a right to, had it been merely for the soundness of some of his remarks, and his evident knowledge of his subject; for Wolcot, who when practising medicine at Truro had discovered and encouraged the genius of John Opie, then a working carpenter in that neighbourhood, had a true as well as cultivated feeling for art. But, although the truth or good sense of his criticism may have done something at first to bring him into notice, it was to attractions of another sort that he owed his popularity. He confined himself to his friends the Academicians, to whom he addressed another set of

odes in 1783, and a third set in 1785, till the latter year, when he came out with the first canto of his Lousiad, the earliest of his lampoons expressly or entirely dedicated to the higher game which henceforward engaged his chief attention. The king, naturally falling in his way as the founder and patron of the Academy, had from the first come in for a side-blow now and then; but from this date their majesties became the main butts of his ridicule, and it was only when no fresh scandal or lie suited for his purpose was afloat about the doings at St. James's or Kew that he wasted his time on anything else. Such a thorn in the side of the royal family did he make himself, that a negociation, it is said, was at one time entered into to purchase his silence. There can be no doubt, indeed, that his daring and incessant derision proved materially injurious to the popularity of the king and queen. Their unscrupulous assailant took all sorts of advantages, fair and unfair, and his ludicrous delineations are certainly no materials for history; but as a caricaturist in rhyme he must be placed very high. His manner, as we have observed, is quite original and his own, however much it may have been imitated since by others. His mere wit is not very pointed; but nobody tells a story better, or brings out the farce of a scene with more breadth and effect. Much of what he has left is hastily executed and worth very little; some of his attempts were not suited to the nature of his powers; much of what made people laugh heartily in his own day has lost its interest with the topics to which it relates; but it may safely be predicted that some of his comic tales, and other things which he has done best, and which have least of a mere temporary reference, will live in the language and retain their popularity. Wolcot survived till 1819; but, although he continued to write and publish till within a few years of his death (producing, among other things, a tragedy, The Fall of Portugal, which appeared without his name in 1808), all his most memorable effusions belong to the first eighteen or twenty years of his authorship. His proper successor, who may be regarded in the main as his imitator or disciple, was the late George Colman the Younger (as he persisted in calling himself so long as he lived); but it has not been generally noticed that from Wolcot Byron also has evidently caught part of the inspiration of his Don Juan-not of its golden poetry, of course, but of the fluent drollery and quaintness of its less elevated passages. Even

there, indeed, it is Wolcot refined and heightened; but still the spirit and manner are essentially the same. Compare, for instance, the harangue of Julia to her husband and his intruding myrmidons, in the first canto of Don Juan, with the Petition of the Cooks in the second canto of the Lousiad.

OTHER POETICAL WRITERS OF THE LATTER PART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Of a number of other poetical writers, or verse-makers, of the latter part of the last century, very little need be said. The celebrated Sir William Jones-the Admirable Crichton of his day-published the first of his poems, consisting mostly of translations from the Asiatic languages, in 1772, in his twenty-sixth year; and he afterwards produced, from time to time, other similar translations, and also some original compositions in verse. He died, in the midst of a career of intellectual conquest which promised to embrace the whole compass of human learning, in 1794. The poetry of Sir William Jones is very sonorous and imposing; and in his happiest efforts there is not wanting nobleness of thought, or glow of passion, as well as pomp of words. He cannot, however, be called a poet of an original genius; any peculiarity of inspiration that may seem to distinguish some of his compositions is for the most part only the Orientalism of the subject, and of the figures and images. He is a brilliant translator and imitator rather than a poet in any higher sense. We cannot say even so much for some other verse-writers of this age, once of great note. Henry James Pye, who died Poet Laureate and a police magistrate in 1813 (having succeeded to the former office in 1790 on the death of Thomas Warton), had in his time discharged upon the unresisting public torrents of Progress of Refinement, Shooting, a Poem, Amusement, a Poetical Essay, Alfred, Faringdom Hill, The Aristocrat, The Democrat, and other ditch-water of the same sort, which the thirsty earth has long since drunk up. Not less unweariedly productive was Hayley, the friend and biographer of Cowper, with his Triumphs of Temper, Triumphs of Music, poetical epistles, elegies, odes, rhyming essays, plays, &c., which had

accumulated to a mass of six octavo volumes so early as 1785, and to which much more forgotten verse was afterwards added— besides his Lives of Cowper and Milton, a prose three-volume Essay on Old Maids, a novel of similar extent, &c., &c. Williant Hayley lived till 1820. With his prose poetry may be classed the several wooden poetical perpetrations of the late learned Richard Payne Knight-The Landscape, published in 1794; The Progress of Civil Society in 1796; The Romance of Alfred, many years after. Mr. Knight died in 1824. Here may be also properly enumerated Cumberland's worthless epics of Calvary, Richard the First, The Exodiad (the two latter written in conjunction with Sir James Bland Burges, and the last not published till 1807-8). Cumberland's Comedies have been already noticed. Another popular poet, and voluminous writer both in verse and prose, of this age was Samuel Jackson Pratt— originally a strolling player, next an itinerant lecturer, finally a Bath bookseller-who, after beginning his literary career as a writer of novels under the designation of Courtney Melmoth, Esq., produced certain long poems, in a style of singularly mawkish sentimentality and empty affectation-Sympathy, Humanity, and sundry others, with which humanity has long ceased to sympathise. Pratt, however, was quite the rage for a time-though his existence had been generally forgotten for a good many years before its earthly close in 1814. Here, too, may be mentioned the Rev. Percival Stockdale, whose first poetical effusion, Churchill Defended, dates so far back as 1765, and who continued scribbling and publishing down nearly to his death, in 1811; but all whose literary labours have passed into utter oblivion, except only his Memoirs of his own Life, published in two octavo volumes in 1809, which is a work that the world will not willingly let die, and to have written which is, of itself, not to have lived in vain. Poor Stockdale's pleasant delusion was merely, that, being one of the smallest men of his time, or of any time, he imagined himself to be one of the greatest-and his autobiography is his exposition and defence of this faith, written with an intense serenity of conviction which the most confirmed believers in anything else whatever might envy.

Mrs. Charlotte Smith, better known as a novelist, made her first appearance as an author, at the age of twenty-five, by the publication, at Chichester, in 1784, of a series of Elegiac Sonnets, in which there was at least considerable poetic promise. Miss