In pursuance of this plan he opened a school, and obtained, in a short space of time, as much encouragement as could be expected in a situation so obscure.*

To men of genius in general an occupation of this nature must be intolerably irksome. The monotonous bondage and elementary drudgery of a school but ill accord with strong sense and a vigorous imagination; and our author often acknowledged that this proved the most disagreeable pursuit in which he had ever been engaged, and that nothing could have supported him under it but a consciousness of the rectitude of his intentions.

He was removed from this disagreeable engagement by an occurrence more distressing to his feelings. In the year 1758, his father died, by which event his family lost a most affectionate monitor and friend, and society an invaluable member; this tribute is justly due to the memory of a man whose strict integrity and amiable disposition endeared him to a numerous acquaintance; in the large circle of which he had scarcely ever excited in others, or experienced in himself, a single emotion of ill will.†

Immediately upon the death of his father,

*We have endeavoured to ascertain the truth of the anecdote, so often repeated, of Churchill's retiring into Wales upon a curacy of £30 a year, his commencing cider merchant to improve his revenue, his ill success in that speculation, and its termination in a sort of rural bankruptcy. The manuscripts in our possession make no mention of these circumstances, and we have every reason to believe that Rainham and Cadbury were the only country churches in which Churchill ever officiated as curate.

† Our Author's mother survived both her husband and her son several years, and died at a very advanced age about the year 1770.

Churchill was unanimously elected as his succes◄ sor to the curacy and lectureship of St. John the Evangelist. This honourable testimony of respect for his father's memory, and for his own merit, became with him an additional incentive to persevere in the line of conduct he had adopted. As a parochial minister, he performed his duties with punctuality, while in the pulpit he was plain, rational, and emphatic.*

When he had been a few months settled at Westminster, notwithstanding his well-grounded aversion from the employment, he once more engaged in the business of tuition, but upon a more eligible footing than before. He now undertook to give lessons in the English tongue to the young ladies at Mrs. Dennis's boarding school in Queen Square, Bloomsbury; and likewise in his leisure hours attended several young gentlemen, who, having acquired a competent skill in the dead languages, were desirous of receiving some assistance in forming their taste, and directing their studies with respect to the classical authors of antiquity. He acquitted himself of these engagements to his own credit, and to the satis faction of his employers.

Such was Charles Churchill, until he was twenty-seven years of age; at which time a total alteration took place in his behaviour. Some acute observers of human nature have imagined, that there is a climacteric of the mind as well as

*Twelve sermons of Churchill's composition have been published, which certainly reflect no additional lustre on his name. In vol. iii. pp. 313 and 318, the reader will find some observations as to their authenticity, with a critique by Dr. Kippis upon them, which we are enabled to confirm by as meritorious an exertion of patience in the perusal of them.

of the body, and that at certain periods revolutions happen in the intellectual as well as in the corporeal frame. Perhaps this doctrine may be thought applicable to our author's case, had not the real cause of this apparently sudden and extraordinary change been too evident. The anxiety arising from domestic infelicity unhinged his mind, naturally of a firm texture, and seemed to give an entirely new bias to his disposition.

Here we must draw the great line of separation, which, as we have suggested, divided the life of our author into two distinct and dissimilar portions; the one serious, rational, and consistent, the other irregular, dissipated, and licentious.

At this time the friendship between Churchill and Robert Lloyd, which had been formed in their boyish days at Westminster school, but which the different situations into which they were afterwards thrown, and the various incidents of their lives, had interrupted for a succession of years, revived with all that glow of sensibility and ardour of attachment, characteristic of men of strong passions and of warm imaginations. Such men recollect with heartfelt complacency the cheerful scenes of artless innocence, and the delightful remembrance of them has a happy tendency to revive and cement their friendship in a future period of their lives.

Robert Lloyd, after having studied at Cambridge, where he acquired a high reputation for classical knowledge, and for proficiency in every branch of polite literature, was appointed to the situation of an usher in Westminster school, of which his father, Dr. Lloyd, was the second master. His character had risen with every opportunity for a display of his abilities. At West

minster, he was considered not only as a useful tutor, but as an ornament to that celebrated seminary. His epigrammatical productions were pointed and concise, and his Latin prologues partook of the beautiful simplicity of Terence. Disgusted with a station so subordinate and laborious,* as compared with the service of the muses, to which he had already dedicated himself by the publication of several fugitive compositions, he determined on resigning his ushership, and trusting solely to his literary abilities for a subsistence.

The repugnance entertained by Lloyd for the situation of usher at a school, is thus feelingly described by himself in one of his fugitive poems:

66

Were I at once impower'd to shew
My utmost vengeance on my foe,
To punish with extremest rigour,
I could inflict no penance bigger
Than using him as learning's tool,
To make him usher of a school.
For me, it hurts me to the soul
To brook confinement or control,
Still to be pinion'd down to teach
The syntax and the parts of speech;
Or, what perhaps begrudging worse,
The links, and joints, and rules of verse,
To deal out authors by retail,

Like penny pots of Oxford ale;

Oh! 'tis a service irksome more
Than tugging at the slavish oar!

The first piece by which he distinguished himself was the Actor, an admirable poem, in which he manifested a peculiar vein of humour combined with great justness of criticism and facility of versification. Thus, high in reputation, the road to honours and preferment seemed to open before him, but an utter disregard of prudence and economy blasted these brilliant expectations, and involved him in a series of calamities. An eccentric disposition, and an unbounded liberality, the too frequent concomitants of a lively imagination, proved his destruction. In these circumstances did our author's intimacy with Lloyd recommence, and, urged by the same motive, a restless inquietude of mind, they together hurried into scenes of dissipated conviviality.

The future is rarely sacrificed to the present without producing consequences of a distressing nature. A few months only had elapsed, before Churchill experienced, in the most sensible manner, the justice of this observation. He found that he had wantonly and precipitately plunged himself into an abyss of misery, the effect of which upon his friends he describes in the following lines:

"When all around me, with an air
Of hopeless sorrow look'd despair;
When they or said, or seem'd to say,
There is but one, one only way.

Better, and be advised by us,

Not be at all, than to be thus."—GHOST, BOOK iv.

At this critical juncture, Dr. Lloyd stepped forth to his assistance. His efforts were no less successful than benevolent. Our author was enabled by his assistance to effect a compromise