nearly four years occupied the attention of the public, could not take place without exciting considerable sensation. He was sincerely lamented by his friends and acquaintance; and his popularity, with a great party, gave to his death the appearance of a national loss. Such was at first the enthusiasm in favour of his memory, that a suggestion was entertained by several eminent artists of raising a subscription among themselves for defraying the expense of erecting a monument to him in Westminster Abbey ; but the notion soon subsided, and will scarcely be revived.*

Dr. Beattie, in 1765, printed some lines on this subject, in which he attacked the memory of our author in a manner unworthy of the head and heart which dictated the Minstrel; the good sense of Sir W. Forbes induced him to expunge this poem from his edition of Beattie's works. It has however been reprinted in most of the subsequent editions, and we give some extracts from the poem as well as from his preliminary observations, to show how far a highly cultivated mind may be warped, under political and national excitement, to a degree of coarse abuse unredeemed by a single particle of wit, or talent.

"When I saw the extravagant honours that were paid to his memory, and heard that a monument in Westminster Abbey was intended for one whom even his admirers acknowledge to have been an incendiary and a debauchee, I could not help wishing that my countrymen would reflect a little on what they were doing before they consecrated, by what posterity would think the public voice, a character which no friend to virtue or true taste could approve."

Bufo, begone! with thee may faction's fire,
That hatch'd thy salamander fame expire;
Fame, dirty idol of the brainless crowd;

What half made moon-calf can mistake for good,
Since shared by knaves of high and low degree,
Cromwell, and Catiline, Guido Faux and thee.
By nature uninspired, untaught by art,

With not one thought that breathes the feeling heart,
With not one offering vow'd to Virtue's shrine,
With not one pure unprostituted line;

Alike debauch'd in body, soul, and lays;

For pension'd censure and for pension'd praise,

It was not until many years after his death, that Dryden obtained a memorial among his bro

For ribaldry, for libels, lewdness, lies,
For blasphemy of all the good and wise,
Coarse violence in coarser doggerel writ,
Which bawling blackguards spell'd and took for wit,
For conscience, honour, slighted, spurn'd, o'erthrown,
Lo! Bufo shines the minion of renown;
And yet, tho' thousand cits admire his rage,
Tho' less of fool than felon marks his page,
Still shall a Bufo's most polluted name
Stain Britain's tablet of untainted fame;

Shall his disgraceful name with theirs be join'd,
Who wish'd and wrought the welfare of mankind;
His name accurst who leagued with Wilkes and Hell,
Labour'd to rouse with rude and murderous yeli,
Discord, the fiend, to toss rebellion's brand,

To whelm in rage and woe a guiltless land.

But when a ruffian whose portentous crimes,
Like plagues and earthquakes terrify the times,
Triumphs thro' life from legal judgment free,
For Hell may hatch what law could ne'er foresee.
Sacred from vengeance shall his memory rest,
Judas, tho' dead, tho' damn'd, we still detest.

The following couplet more good-humouredly expressed the whole sense and substance of Beattie's tirade.

EPITAPH ON THE SUGGESTION OF A MONUMENT TO
C. CHURCHILL IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

"Tho' you finish the work with most masterly skill,
All judges will say, it becomes a Church-ill."

By way of antidote, were any needed, to Dr. Beattie's intemperate lines, we extract from Lord Byron's Poems a pathetic tribute to the genius and memory of Churchill, with a mournful recognition prompted by his own melancholy ex perience of "the glory and the nothing of a name.'

CHURCHILL'S GRAVE.

[A fact literally rendered.]

I stood beside the grave of him who blazed
The comet of a season, and I saw

The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed
With not the less of sorrow and of awe

ther poets. Perhaps another Sheffield may arise to place Churchill, his legitimate offspring, by the side of that great poet.

In the year 1765, the celebrated Abbé Winckelman having presented Wilkes with an antique sepulchral urn of alabaster, the latter caused the

On that neglected turf and quiet stone,

With name no clearer than the names unknown,
Which lay unread around it; and I ask'd
The gardener of that ground, why it might be
That for this plant strangers his memory task'd
Through the thick deaths of half a century.
And thus he answer'd, "Well, I do not know
Why frequent travellers turn to pilgrims so;
He died before my day of Sextonship,
And I had not the digging of this grave."
And is this all, I thought-and do we rip
The veil of immortality, and crave

I know not what of honour and of light
Thro' unborn ages, to endure this blight,
So soon and so successless? as I said,
The architect of all on which we tread,
For earth is but a tombstone, did essay
To extricate remembrance from the clay,

Whose minglings might confuse a Newton's thought,
Were it not that all life must end in one

Of which we are but dreamers, as he caught

As 'twere the twilight of a former sun,
Thus spoke, "I believe the man of whom
You wot, who lies in this selected tomb,

Was a most famous writer in his day,

And therefore travellers step from out their way
To pay him honour-and myself whate'er-

Your honour pleases"-then most pleased I shook

From out my pocket's avaricious nook

Some certain coins of silver, which as 'twere
Perforce I gave this man, tho' I could spare
So much but inconveniently-ye smile,

I see ye, ye profane ones all the while,

Because my homely phrase the truth would tell.
You are the fools, not I, for I did dwell,
With a deep thought and with a soften'd eye,
On that old Sexton's natural homily,

In which there was obscurity and fame,
The glory and the nothing of a Name.

following inscription, closely imitative of the terse style of the ancients, to be engraven on it :

Carolo Churchill,

Amico Jucundo

Poetæ acri

Civi optime de patria merito

P

Johannes Wilkes.

MDCCLXV.

The same inscription is on a Doric pillar, erected to his memory by Mr. Wilkes, in the grove of Sandham cottage, in the Isle of Wight. It is in the middle of the grove; behind it are weeping willows, cypresses, and yews. Laurels seem to grow out of the column, as from Virgil's tomb at Naples, and nearly descend to the tablet on the pillar, which is fluted, and appears in some parts already injured by time. On the foreground are large myrtles, bays, laburnums, &c. The shaft is broken, and is about nine feet in height, and five in diameter.*

Churchill left two sons, Charles and John, the charge of whose education was generously undertaken by Sir Richard Jebb, who sent the former to the university of Cambridge with a handsome allowance. They neither of them proved worthy of this support, inheriting the faults, without the good qualities or genius of their father, and died, like him, victims to their disregard of temperance and prudence.†

* So described by Dr. Anderson in 1794.

† It does not appear that Charles ever married, or if he did, no issue survived. John made an imprudent marriage, and went to France, where he died, leaving a widow and an only child, a daughter, born in 1793; they came to England in about 1813, and interested Mr. Mudford and Mr. Pratt

Of the numerous publications relating to Churchill and his works which appeared during his life, and soon after his death, notice has been taken in the remarks upon his poems; and we shall not trespass on the patience of our readers, by any farther mention of them. They have, like many other things, become valuable, only because they are scarce, and became scarce, only because they were of no value; their titles, names, and merits, are preserved in the reviews of the day, while

to undertake a subscription on their behalf, and at whose instance the following statement of their case was circulated:

"THE GRAND-DAUGHTER OF CHARLES CHURCHILL.

If the assertion of Johnson be true, that " the chief glory of every people arises from its authors," may it not be hoped that an enlightened nation will identify its own greatness with the prosperity of its literary men and their posterity? When the grand-daughter of Milton was discovered in poverty, a generous emulation appeared, who should be foremost 'to honor the memory of the great Epic Poet, by befriending his aged and indigent descendant. This was worthy of a people proud of their literary greatness. A similar occasion now calls for similar benevolence, the grand-daughter of Charles Churchill, of a writer not excelled by any for vigour of imagination, and for a manly independence of character, is at this moment languishing in poverty, sinking under accumulated embarrassments, with the added pain of beholding a mother the sharer of her afflictions. The benevolence of the public would not only relieve them from the threatened terrors of a prison, but enable the daughter to avail herself of peculiar advantages she possesses to support herself and mother. Born in France, the victim and survivor of all the horrors that marked the progress of the French Revolution, she has now, in her twentieth year, visited the soil of her ancestors, hoping to subsist by her industry in the country that has been adorned by the writings of her progenitor."

It appears that both mother and daughter behaved with much ingratitude to the gentlemen who had so liberally espoused their cause, the subscription which had been headed by the late Earl Spencer languished accordingly. In 1820, the daughter, Mary Churchill, was French Governess in a school at Elstree, Herts, and in 1825, was a patient in St. George's Hospital, from whence we have not traced her.