53

liked Pope's manner as a poet, and his character as a man and had formed the intention of attacking both 54. "Mr. Pope, said he, in a letter to Wilkes, "ought surely to feel some instinctive terrors, for against him I have double-pointed all my little thunderbolts; in which, as to the design, I hope I shall have your approbation when you consider his heart; and as to the execution, if you approve it, I can sit down easily and hear with contempt the censures of all the half-blooded, prudish lords." It is not to be regretted that Churchill contented himself with libelling the living, and never carried into effect this injurious intention which he entertained against the dead: for the force of even just criticism is weakened when it is delivered with an asperity that savours of personal malevolence. But if "it disgusted Churchill to hear Pope extolled as the first of English poets," his own judgment was not less erroneous when he assigned that place to Dryden. Dryden was, indeed, the best model whom, with his power and turn of mind, he could have chosen for himself, even if that power had always taken its best direction. He followed him with success. The freedom and vigour of his versification, in which sense was never sacrificed to sound, which was never tricked out with tinsel, nor spangled with false ornaments, which, whatever were its faults, was free from nonsense, and which always expressed in genuine English its clear meaning, contributed to prepare the way for a better

53 The Monthly Review observes that this "enmity, which broke out so long after Pope's death, is somewhat extraordinary, and the more so, as the satirist's spleen seems chiefly to have been directed against his private character, a circumstance in regard to which, we believe, there are not many who hold the two poets in equal estimation. What ample room is there for recrimination on the traducer of Mr. Pope's heart! But it were unnecessary, as well as an ungrateful task, to enlarge on this topic-since few, if any, of our readers are strangers to the moral character and conduct of Charles Churchill."-Vol. xli. p. 378.

51 Wilkes says, he "intended to have sifted every part of his character," and Wilkes gives his own opinion of Pope. "His writings," he says, "almost the only truly correct, elegant, and high-finished poems in our language, breathe the purest morality, the most perfect humanity and benevolence. In the commerce of life, however, he showed himself not scrupulously moral, and was a very selfish, splenetic, malevolent being. The friends whom he most loved, were the sworn enemies of the liberties of his country, Atterbury, Oxford, and Bolingbroke, on whom he lavished the sweet incense of a delicate exquisite praise, which ought only to have been purchased by virtue."

taste than prevailed during Pope's undisputed supremacy. The injurious effects which had been caused by that dictatorship were weakened by Churchill's rule as Tribune of the people.

His immediate imitators were a despicable race; among his numerous opponents there had been a few whose greatest disadvantage was that they took the better side, which, under a tribunate is always the unsuccessful one; but those who attempted to tread in his steps, and succeed him, were mere libellers 55, with no other qualification than their impudence ;.. "a Calmuck tribe of authors," they were called, "the brood of Churchill's spawn, and the heirs of his Billingsgate fortune." They passed away like a swarm of noxious insects; and Churchill himself was for a time depreciated 56 as unduly as he had been extolled. The first who rendered justice to his genius was Cowper:

While servile trick and imitative knack

Confine the million in the beaten track,
Perhaps some courser, who disdains the road,
Snuffs up the wind, and flings himself abroad.
Contemporaries all surpass'd see one,
Short his career indeed, but ably run;
Churchill, himself unconscious of his powers,
In penury consumed his idle hours;
And like a scatter'd seed at random sown
Was left to spring by vigour of his own.
Lifted at length by dignity of thought
And dint of genius to an affluent lot,
He laid his head on luxury's soft lap,
And took too often there his easy nap.

55"The dominions of Alexander the Great had not more competitors after his decease than the poetical demesnes of the late Mr. Churchill. Various, indeed, are the candidates, but their pretences are nearly the same;-to measure couplets, to scatter abuse, and to praise the bard whose name they take in vain.' Their ambition, at the same time, is as sordid as their verse; for it is not Mr. Churchill's crown of laurel that they seek, but his half-crown sterling."-Monthly Review, February, 1765, vol. xxxii. p. 153. Twenty years before a wretched precursor of the libelists complained of the restraint under which his "Indignant Muse" laboured

"Names must be conceal'd: O misfortune dire !

Law checks my rage, and lawyers damp my fire."

56 "A remarkable instance," says Dr. Kippis, "of a sudden and shortlived celebrity-and of a more than usual rapidity in the neglect paid to his writings."

"We all remember," says Dr. Warton, "when even a Churchill was more in vogue than a Gray."

66

If brighter beams than all he threw not forth,
'Twas negligence in him, not want of worth.
Surly and slovenly, and bold and coarse,
Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force;
Spendthrift alike of money and of wit;
Always at speed, and never drawing bit,
He struck the lyre in such a careless mood,
And so disdain'd the rules he understood,
The laurel seem'd to wait on his command,
He snatch'd it rudely from the Muses' hand 57.

When Johnson's collection of the poets was lent to Cowper, he read but few of them: "those of established reputation,' said he, are so fresh in my memory, that it was like reading what I read yesterday over again: and as to the minor classics, I did not think them worth reading at all. I tasted most of them, and did not like them.” But Churchill had been included in Bell's collection, where he brought up the rear; and in the same letter which expresses his disrespect for the mediocrists, Cowper says, "I have read him twice, and some of his pieces three times over, and the last time with more pleasure than the first. He is indeed a careless writer for the most part, but where shall we find in any of those authors who finish their works with the exactness of a Flemish pencil, those bold and daring strokes of fancy, those numbers so hazardously ventured upon and so happily finished, the matter so compressed and yet so clear, and the colouring so sparingly laid on and yet with such a beautiful effect? In short, it is not his least praise, that he is never guilty of those faults as a writer which he lays to the charge of others; a proof that he did not judge by a borrowed standard, or from rules laid down by critics; but that he was qualified to do it by his own native powers, and his great superiority of genius. For he that wrote so much and so fast would, through inadvertence and hurry, have departed from rules which he might have found in books; but his own truly poetical talent was a guide which could not suffer him

to err

58 99

When he was composing his first volume, Cowper reckoned it among his principal advantages that he had read no English poetry for many years. But as the poems whereby he became known to the public were all written when he was advanced considerably beyond the middle age, he was less likely to be 57 Table Talk. 58 To Mr. Unwin.

tinctured by the manner of any favourite author than youthful aspirants must always be. And the same cause would have prevented him from being influenced by contemporary writers, even if his habits of retired life, and the total desuetude of poetical reading for so many years had not kept him unacquainted with any thing that had been published during half a generation. If there was any savour of other poets in his pieces, it was of Lloyd in some of the smaller ones, and of Churchill in his satires.

59 99

When Cowper, however, commenced author, he perceived the necessity of reading: "He that would write," said he, "should read, not that he may retail the observations of other men, but that being thus refreshed and replenished, he may find himself in a condition to make and to produce his own Just after he had finished The Task, he purchased a Latin Dictionary. "It is rather strange," said he to Mr. Unwin 60, "that at my time of life, and after a youth spent in classical pursuits, I should want one; and stranger still, that, being possessed at present of only one Latin author in the world, I should think it worth while to purchase one. I say that it is strange, and indeed I think it so myself. But I have thought that when my present labours of the pen are ended, I may go to school again, and refresh my spirits by a little intercourse with the Mantuan and the Sabine bards; and perhaps by a reperusal of some others, whose works we generally lay by at that period of life when we are best qualified to read them,when the judgement and the taste being formed, their beauties are least likely to be overlooked."-"I have bought a great dictionary," he says to Mr. Newton", "and want nothing but Latin authors to furnish me with the use of it. Had I purchased them first, I had begun at the right end; but I could not afford it. I beseech you admire my prudence.' Horace was the Latin author which he possessed : but he had borrowed Virgil from one neighbour, and Homer, with a Clavis, from another, and had had them for some years.

His English reading at that time was upon scarcely a wider scale. My studies," he says, દ are very much confined, and of little use, because I have no books but what I borrow, and nobody will lend me a memory: my own is almost worn out. I read the Biographia and the Review. If all the readers of

59 To Mr. Unwin, Nov. 26, 1781.

61 July 5, 1784.

60 July 3, 1784.

the former had memories like mine, the compilers of that work would in vain have laboured to rescue the great names of past ages from oblivion; for what I read to-day, I forget to-morrow. A by-stander might say, 'this is rather an advantage, the book is always new.' But I beg the by-stander's pardon: I can recollect, though I cannot remember; and with the book in my hand I recognise those passages, which, without the book, I should never have thought of more. The Review pleases me most, because if the contents escape me, I regret them less, being a very supercilious reader of most modern writers. Either I dislike the subject, or the manner of treating it; the style is affected, or the matter is disgusting 62"

But in one of these points Cowper depreciated himself, and in the other he wronged himself. There are indications enough in his poems of a practical and retentive memory; and the facility with which he composed Latin verses, after so many years disuse, is proof not only that he had been well taught, but that he well remembered what he had once learned. Neither was he so fastidious a reader as he represented himself to be, and as he formerly had been. There is a time of life at which men of genius, . . and still more men of talents,.. are likely to be so, when they are fully aware of their own powers, and have not attained the knowledge of their own deficiencies. They are then more disposed to descry faults in a book, however good, and to seek in it for matter of ridicule, than to learn from it and be thankful. Such a temper had prevailed in the Nonsense Club; but even poor Lloyd lived long enough to outgrow it: Colman made ample amends to Mason for his share in the mock lyrics, by bringing Elfrida and Caractacus upon the stage; and Cowper, though he accused himself of being a supercilious reader, had long before seen and acknowledged, that in proportion as he had been so in early life, his judgement had been warped by prejudice. Indeed, unless he were provoked by some gross injustice of criticism, or some glaring faults in style, he was disposed to think favourably of any book that entertained him, and to rate its merits at their full value,.. certainly never to depreciate them. When he looked at the world" through the loopholes of retreat," it was from a distance at which none of its sounds were audible. He knew nothing of the public opinion concerning current litera62 To Mr. Newton, April 20, 1783. 63 See p. 180.