CHARLES CHURCHILL.

[CHARLES CHURCHILL was born in Westminster in 1731, and died at Boulogne in 1;64. A poor London curate, who eked out his salary by teaching, he made a hit by his Rosciad, a satire on contemporary actors, in 1761, and during the brief residue of his life abandoned himself to hterature and dissipation.]

The celebrity of the smart versemaking of Churchill marks a low point in English taste. It nearly secured him a poet's monument in Westminster Abbey; and it actually secured a poet's rank for a petulant rhymer without a spark of the poet's imagination, of cold heart, natural bad taste, and very little knowledge of that narrow world which he so impudently lampooned. Nothing in Churchill reveals a gleam of genial feeling, or justifies the suspicion that he could take any pleasure in what refines or elevates. If we may believe his own account of himself, nature had given him little enough, beyond an ugly face, a sour temperament, and a bitter tongue. Yet he was not dissatisfied. He was very willing to be taken for what he was: and if he could not win liking and respect, he was content to be feared. In all this there must have been something of affectation. Yet it is only too clear that the coarse texture of his mind was impermeable to the kindlier and worthier influences of his time. What it most readily absorbed was that hatred of authority in general which keen observers saw widely spread in England long before it convulsed society in France and poverty, obscurity, and habits of monotonous toil, sadly evinced by the industry with which he practised his new-found trade, had even in youth embittered a sour nature, and made him a Jacobin at heart. At all aristocracy, social, political, and intellectual, Churchill railed with vicious delight. The artificiality of his times revolted him with better reason. But with all his boasting of

nature and originality, few writers have less of the true spirit of either. The nature which he really followed was the coarse and narrow nature within him; and his originality consisted mainly in ostentatiously abandoning proportion and propriety. His success was due to his capacity of absorption and imitation. He had studied Dryden and Pope minutely, an i learnt the trick of octosyllabic singsong from Butler and Swift. But the knowledge of man, the power of burlesque, the skilful play of jest and earnest, which are the essentials of true satire, were denied to Churchill. His whole stock in trade was his volubility, his bitterness of soul, and his knack of rhyme : and he cast over what he wrote something of the ungenial seriousness of his clerica} calling. His address to Truth suggests that he knew where his strength and his weakness lay.

But come not with that easy mien
By which you won the lively Dean,
Nor yet assume that strumpet air

Which Rabelais taught thee first to wear,
Nor yet that arch ambiguous face
With which Cervantes gave thee grace:
But come in sacred vesture clad,
Solemnly dull, and truly sad.
Far from thy seemly matron train
Be idiot mirth, and laughter vain!
For wit and humour, which pretend
At once to please us and amend,
They are not for my present turn,

Let them remain in France with Sterne.'

The Ghost, Book II.

The description of his muse, with which the following selection commences, is truthful enough. The neglect of his style was no studied air, but arose from natural slovenliness, from imperfect command over brain and pen, and no doubt from unwillingness to strike out lines which produced him half-a-crown a copy when the total of a sheet was made up. The poverty of Churchill's mind is curiously illustrated by the poem on the Cock Lane Ghost, a sub· ject which might perhaps have supplied Dryden with materials for a hundred lines. Churchill spins it out to over four thousand. His field was limited to the narrow topics of the town: and his ambition was to be the censor of its manners and the scourge

of its vices. But he failed to become the Dryden or the Juvenal of his age. All interest in his writings has disappeared with their ephemeral incidents and conditions: and that which has redeemed him from oblivion is his boisterous energy, his brazen effrontery, his extraordinary command of common pedestrian English, and the sharp relief in which he stands out among the formal poetasters of his day, and which perhaps entitles him to be regarded as a precursor of the better school of poetry which arose with Burns, Cowper, and Wordsworth. Cowper, we know, had a real admiration for him'. His earliest work, the Rosciad, is his best, because in it he most adhered to good models. His later works will serve the student as a rich mine of all sorts of errors in taste and judgment. In proportion as he abandoned himself to his own guidance, his work degenerated, and the poverty of his thought appeared; and in three years he had literally written himself out. But in all that he wrote there is a certain fierce manliness which wins attention, and even sympathy for his untutored brain and unsoftened heart, and this effect is heightened by the story of his life and death. No writer requires to be read with more caution by those who seek in literature a reflection of history and politics. The exaggerated Whiggism of Churchill betrays a want of political knowledge and judgment, and it did not save him from being deceived by the gross imposture of The Patriot King. His adulation of Pitt was part of the cant of the day but Wilkes, the idol of the mob, was the object of his real sympathies, and Wilkes repaid him with patronage. The pair were well matched, and Churchill might be described as the Wilkes of poetry.

:

Cf. the lines given on p 436.

E. J. PAYNE

DESCRIPTION OF HIS MUSE

[From The Prophecy of Famine.]

Me, whom no muse of heavenly birth inspires,
No judgment tempers when rash genius fires:
Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhyme,
Short gleams of sense, and satire out of time,
Who cannot follow where trim Fancy leads
By prattling streams,' o'er 'flower-empurpled meads';
Who often, but without success, have prayed
For apt alliteration's artful aid:

Who would, but cannot, with a master's skill,

Coin fine new epithets, which mean no ill—

Me, thus uncouth, thus every way unfit

For pacing poesy, and ambling wit,

TASTE with contempt beholds, nor deigns to place
Among the lowest of her favoured race!

CHARACTERS OF ACTORS.

[From The Rosciad.]

Havard and Davies.

Here Havard, all serene, in the same strains,
Loves, hates, and rages, triumphs and complains:
His easy vacant face proclaim'd a heart
Which could not feel emotions, nor impart.
With him came mighty Davies. (On my life,
That Davies hath a very pretty wife!)
Statesman all over! In plots famous grown!
He mouths a sentence as curs mouth a bone.

Yates.

In characters of low and vulgar mould,
Where nature's coarsest features we behold,
Where, destitute of every decent grace,
Unmannered jests are blurted in your face,
There Yates with justice strict attention draws,
Acts truly from himself, and gains applause.

But when, to please himself or charm his wife,
He aims at something in politer life,

When, blindly thwarting nature's stubborn plan,
He treads the stage by way of gentleman,

The clown, who no one touch of breeding knows,
Looks like Tom Errand dressed in Clincher's clothes.
Fond of his dress, fond of his person grown,

Laugh'd at by all, and to himself unknown,

From side to side he struts, he smiles, he prates,
And seems to wonder what's become of Yates.

Foote.

By turns transformed into all kind of shapes,
Constant to none, Foote laughs, cries, struts, and scrapes :
Now in the centre, now in van or rear,

The Proteus shifts, bawd, parson, auctioneer.
His strokes of humour, and his burst of sport,
Are all contained in this one word-distort.
Doth a man stutter, look asquint, or halt?
Mimics draw humour out of nature's fault:
With personal defects their mirth adorn,
And hang misfortunes out to public scorn.
Ev'n I, whom nature cast in hideous mould,
Whom having made, she trembled to behold,
Beneath the load of mimicry may groan,
And find that nature's errors are my own.

Quin.

His eyes, in gloomy socket taught to roll,
Proclaimed the sullen habit of his soul.
Heavy and phlegmatic he trod the stage,
Too proud for tenderness, too dull for rage.

In fancied scenes, as in life's real plan,
He could not, for a moment, sink the man.
In whate'er cast his character was laid,
Self still, like oil, upon the surface played:
Nature, in spite of all his skill, crept in,
Horatio, Dorax, Falstaff-still 't was Quin.