With false feigned zeal an injured God defend, Stand blazing forth, while marked with envious blot, Of all those evils which, to stamp men curst, Hell keeps in store for vengeance, may the worst Whom Shelburne fled, and Calcraft blushed to own.1 Johnson was perhaps somewhat unjust to Churchill in the witty sentence recorded by Boswell : Sir, I called the fellow a blockhead at first, and I will call him a blockhead still. However, I will acknowledge that I have a better opinion of him now than I once had; for he has shown more fertility than I expected. To be sure, he is a tree that cannot produce good fruit; he only bears crabs. But, Sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better than a tree which produces only a few.2 Churchill should rather be compared to those wild trees spoken of by Virgil, which by the gift of nature are, with pruning and culture, capable of bearing fruit both abundant and good. But pruning and culture were arts with which Churchill thought that he could dispense; hence, as a satirist, he did not rise above the rank of Oldham, whom 3 1 The Conference, 271-294. 2 Boswell's Life of Johnson, chap. xvi. 1763. 3 Compare Virg. Georg. lib. ii. 47-56: Sponte sua quae se tollunt in luminis auras, Infecunda quidem, sed laeta et fortia, surgunt : Quippe solo natura subest. Tamen haec quoque si quis 1 he resembles in many points both of his career and his character, though the total effect of his work is different. Both were inflamed by a common passion for poetry and independence; both turned aside from their early professions to seek a maintenance by means of literature; both died an early death. They may each be described as poetical demagogues; Oldham taking advantage of the public fury in the Popish Plot, and Churchill of the popular infatuation about Wilkes. They were alike "by too much force betrayed." Oldham was the superior in imagination, invention, and judgment; Churchill in largeness of vocabulary and command of metrical effect: their qualities united would have produced first-rate satire; but this end was not attained by either, because the one did not understand that wit was incomplete unless supplemented with harmony, and the other that it would be wasted without proper direction. Churchill was the last satirist of the line of Dryden and Pope, in whose work the ethical element is combined with the political. Inferior as he is to his predecessors, he still upholds in his verse the great satiric ideal first set forth by Pope, as a member of the Opposition in Walpole's age: O sacred weapon! left for truth's defence, Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence! To all but heaven-directed hands denied, The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide : To rouse the watchmen of the public weal, To virtue's work provoke the tardy hall, And goad the prelate slumbering in his stall.2 But in the following generation political satire dwindles into the avowed weapon of faction. In the years between 1783 and 1788 the two most prominent men in England were Warren Hastings and William Pitt the younger. Hastings at that period had just laid the firm foundations 1 For an account of Oldham, see vol. iii. pp. 497-505. of England's Indian Empire, and in doing so had incurred responsibility for actions that called for the intervention of the English Parliament. Charles Fox, having formed a political coalition with Lord North, introduced a Bill for the government of India which, if it had passed into an Act, would have brought the Crown into subjection to the Whig Party, by absorbing all the patronage of the East India Company. Perceiving the object of the measure, the King used his influence to have it rejected by the House of Lords, and almost immediately afterwards exercised his constitutional right of dismissing his Ministers. In their place he summoned Pitt to form a Ministry, and the latter, after accomplishing this task, contrived, by splendid strategy, in the face of an infuriated Opposition commanding a majority of the House of Commons, to carry on the Government till the fitting moment arrived for a Dissolution of Parliament. In the new Parliament he was made by the electorate master of the situation; and all that was left to the Whigs was to avenge themselves in one of the most entertaining political satires in the English language. It is not too much to say that any reader, who will take the trouble to master the details of The Rolliad, will be able to obtain for himself a more vivid conception of the actual life and feeling of English political warfare in the decade preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution than he could get from the narrative of the most accurate historian or the most brilliant essayist. The satire was the work of a confederacy of Whig wits of whom the chief were Fox's most intimate friend the able Richard Fitzpatrick (1747-1813), Sheridan's protégé Richard Tickell, author of Anticipation, a descendant of Addison's eulogist and Pope's rival translator (1751-1793), and Joseph Richardson, M.P. for Newport (1755-1803), another friend of Sheridan. The contributions to the satire were made after the model of the Scriblerus Club, and the unity of the general design was most artistically preserved. Criticisms on the Rolliad began to appear in The Morning Post in the latter part of 1784, and when this vein was exhausted, the satire was continued in Political Eclogues and Probationary Odes, etc., through 1785. The Rolliad makes no pretence to those motives of ethical indignation which are professed in the satires of Churchill; it goes far beyond the latter in the minuteness of its scandalous chronicle and the virulence of its party and personal allusions. On the other hand, it furnishes an artistic justification for the pettiness of its details in the excellence of its form. This was evidently suggested by the ironical commentary of Martinus Scriblerus on The Dunciad, but is adapted to suit the new fashion of periodical criticism to which the public had become accustomed in The Monthly and The Critical Reviews. An epic poem called The Rolliad is supposed to exist, the beauties of which are set forth in a succession of papers, after the manner of Addison's essays in The Spectator on Paradise Lost. While the nominal hero of the epic is Rollo, Duke of Normandy, the Criticisms are for the most part concentrated on a single episode, in which Merlin reveals to the hero the future feats and fame of his descendant, John Rolle, member for Devonshire-notorious for his interruptions of Burke when speaking- and of his allies on the Ministerial side of the House of Commons. Extracts from the non-existent poem are made in the successive papers, whenever the critic desires to satirise a leading supporter of Pitt. The pleasantry of the attacks is admirable, and on the whole, considering the heated state of the atmosphere,1 the limits of decency and good breeding are fairly observed. But no personal weakness. in the victims, no damaging insinuation, is passed over by these relentless partisans. The actions, characters, and even the appearance of the leading combatants, are brought before us in vivid verse from the very opening of the 1 Horace Walpole says in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, dated 12th March 1784: "Politics have engrossed all conversation, and stifled other events, if any have happened. . . Indeed our ladies, who used to contribute to enliven conversation are become politicians, and, as Lady Townley says, 'squeeze a little too much lemon into conversation.' They have been called back a little to their own profession-dress, by a magnificent ball which the Prince of Wales gave two nights ago to near six hundred persons, to which the amazons of both parties were invited; and not a scratch was given or received!” conflict. We see Lord Temple claiming his right as Privy Councillor to advise his Majesty in private audience, before the introduction of Fox's India Bill into the House of Lords : On the great day when Buckingham by pairs Ascended, Heaven-impelled, the K's back stairs ; We see the burly form of William Grenville-Joint Paymaster of the Forces with Lord Mulgrave in the new Government-and Sydney the Lord Chamberlain :— Sydney whom all the powers of rhetoric grace, At once with ease had reached to Indostan. The Marquis of Graham, son of the Duke of Montrose, said in the House in answer to the speech of some Opposition member, that, "if his honourable friend were justly called a goose, he supposed he must be a gosling." The satirist at once seized the opportunity: If right the Bard whose numbers sweetly flow, Th' admiring Commons from the high-born youth And placed the prodigy on Learning's throne. And in the later Political Eclogues he returned to the subject :— 1 The mixture of metaphors in Hastings' Despatches is a fruitful source of satire for the authors of The Rolliad. |