TWENTY YEARS OF POLITICAL SATIRE. THOUGH it may seem a rather cowardly thing for a critic to say, I am myself much inclined to doubt whether any very satisfactory result comes of attempts to decide why this or that literary product came at that or this time. The theory of the product of the circumstances was a very pretty and ingenious toy, which, like many toys in literature, in philosophy, and in other departments of toy-making, amused the town for a time, but has now had its day. Of course we can see in general why certain times-the time when Greece became from an insignificant collection of petty states the most formidable power in the Mediterranean, the time of the completest and most unchallenged Roman domination, the time when the Dark blossomed into the Middle Ages, the time of the Reformation and the discovery of America, the time of the French Revolution-should all have been fertile in literature. As a man is most inclined to perpetrate literature when he is excited, so is a world. But when you come down to minor matters I doubt very much whether any such explanation is possible. I could make twenty very pretty ones for the singular development of political and semi-political satire during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century in England; but I should be the first to admit that one was no better than another, and that any twentyfirst was likely to be as good, or at least as sufficient, as the whole of them. The popularity and novelty of the swinging easy measures, the audacious and lively parody of Anstey's Bath Guide, the fact of the coincidence of the palmy days of the English public school and university system, as regards its peculiar style of scholarship, with the period when public school ance and university men had most direct, immediate, and easy entrance into politics, the keenness of political disputes, which till the Revolution itself broke out turned upon no vital question but were all the keener, the general curiosity and partial annoycaused by the supremacy of Pitt at so early an age, the absence of any passionate or absorbing school of literature to divert literary talent from mere sport-these and a dozen other things may be detected by any tolerably acute observer, and justified by any tolerably diligent student. It is sufficient for me to indicate them in passing. The fact, however, of the existence of a peculiar kind of political and semipolitical verse at this time—a kind rather imitated than continued since, and quite different from the political satire of a hundred years earlier, at the head of which towers Absalom and Achitophel, from the still earlier form of Butler, and from the later and quite recent work of Churchill-is indisputable; and it is equally indisputable that it produced some of the most amusing stuff to be found anywhere in English literature. Its crowning achievement, the inimitable though constantly imitated Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, has just been re-edited by Mr. Henry Morley, Mr. Morley's indefatigable industry in selecting and editing much of the best work of English authors in cheap, easily accessible, and sometimes by no means uncomely forms, cannot be too gratefully acknowledged by any person of taste. But the gratitude must be mixed with pain at several literary tricks of Mr. Morley's, notably that interlarding his text with portions of biographical and critical matter, instead of abiding by the only orthodox and catholic plan of preserving the integrity of the text and keeping introduction and notes to themselves. In the same volume Mr. Morley has included (chiefly it would appear for the reason that George Ellis was a contributor to both books) a very few specimens of The Rolliad, a production on the other side of politics much earlier and less finished, but, allowing for the absence of two such wits as Canning and Frere, not so much less amusing. As his concern was with the work of the trio exclusively, he has also given The Microcosm and other nonpolitical matter. My aim being different, the subjects of this paper will be The Rolliad, with its dependent Political Eclogues, Probationary Odes, and Political Miscellanies at one end, and the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin at the other, with, between them, the exceedingly diverting work of Peter Pindar. The Rolliad (as its facetious authors themselves record, with greater literal accuracy than attaches to all their statements) "owed its existence to the memorable speech of the member of (sic) Devonshire on the first discussion of the Westminster scrutiny " which followed the famous Westminster election in 1784-the contest between Fox and Sir Cecil Wray The Political Eclogues, and the Probationary Odes for the Laureateship, ostensibly occasioned by Whitehead's death, followed in 1785; while the Political Miscellanies were originally appended to The Rolliad itself, or rather to the criticisms of and specimens from that imaginary epic. They were all the work of a knot of literary Whigs-for Ellis, who was afterwards a staunch Tory, then had Whiggish leanings-mostly members of Brooks's, mostly personal friends of Fox, and all animated by the keenest dislike of the boy - minister, Pitt. Various" keys" have, as in other cases of the same kind, indicated, no doubt more or less correctly, their names, though not all the pieces are attributable with certainty. Dr. Laurence, No. 365.-vOL. LXI. the friend of Burke, seems to have been the guiding spirit, and he was assisted by Lord John Townshend; by Tickell (not unconnected with Addison's lieutenant), and by that very clever Irishman, Fitzpatrick; by a still cleverer compatriot of his, Tierney; once or twice by Sheridan, by General Burgoyne, who was more fortunate with the pen than with the sword; and, besides others known or unknown, by Ellis, then a little over thirty and known only by some contributions to the once famous Batheaston Vase, and by a few other light verses in the eighteenth century manner, but already a very wide, careful, and accomplished student of literature. It has been thought with some reason that the rondeaux which figure in The Rolliad verses, for the first and last time for many years in English literature are due to him. The variety, indeed, of the form of The Rolliad is one of its principal charms. The subjects are tolerably numerous-the Westminster election, the wickedness of Hastings and Impey, the follies and clownishness of the titular hero Mr. Rolle (a Devonshire squire of great wealth, popularity, and power, who was obnoxious to the Whigs as a pillar of Pittism in the west), Sir Cecil Wray, Sir Joseph Mawbey, Dr. Prettyman, and "those about "Pitt generally, with, for a constant resource and change whenever other subjects grew scarce or stale, Pitt himself, his policy, his character, and above all his supposed dislike of women. On this latter theme the wits were never tired of descanting, despite the discouraging fact that the British public obstinately refused to see the joke. Nor has political satire ever gone quite so far in this direction since. The writers of The Anti-Jacobin gave themselves some license, but they never came anywhere near The Rolliad. Indeed, short as was the interval between the two 1 A copy, however, of the edition of 1799, with apparently contemporary pencil notes, which my friend Mr. Austin Dobson has lent me, attributes them to Laurence. Ꮓ books, it may be doubted whether public sentiment would have endured it if they had. It would, however, be quite a mistake to imagine that the appeal of The Rolliad lies in mere scurrility. On the contrary it is uncommonly good fun, and, Tory as I am, I have not the least hesitation in admitting that now, and for some time to come, the Whig dogs, with Laurence and his pack on one side and Wolcot by himself on the other, had very much the best of it. Pitt's notorious indifference, despite his scholarship, to English letters and English men of letters may have had something to do with this, but so it was. Nothing on the other side could touch The Rolliad and "Peter" till the French Revolution made half these Whig songsters Tories, and considerably softened even the "savage Wolcot" himself. The Rolliad suffers, of course, from certain inevitable drawbacks of almost all political literature. The principal questions are not excessively interesting, the minor ones are utterly dead and forgotten, there are constant allusions which hardly anybody, and some which probably nobody understands. The work, as all work done by a great number of hands must be, is very unequal. But the sparkle of it, the restless energy, the constant change of form and front, the "certain vital marks are very attractive; especially, no doubt, because they are at least often combined with good literary form. The thing was not absolutely original. It had more or less immediate ancestors in the miscellanies of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay, and its lineage might easily be traced even farther back. But I think that any one who reads The Rolliad will perceive in it that kind of noteworthiness which consists in being much more like what came after it than like what came before it. Its epigrams are somewhat out of date —the epigram proper, more's the pity, has been very little cultivated of late. Its Virgilian parodies appeal now less than they appealed to a generation in which almost every educated man knew his Virgil by heart. Its skits of verse preserve the style of Pope in a way which reminds us that that style was still omnipotent. But yet it has those vital marks which make the better class of literary work in all ages seem modern to the tolerably well-read reader. We should, alas !—for engraving has gone out with epigrams-find a difficulty in getting anything so well engraved nowadays as its frontispiece, with a genealogical tree starting out of the bowels of Duke Rollo and bearing roundels recording how divers Rolles were unfortunately sus. per coll., or the vignette neatly exhibiting the arms of the family-three French rolls or between two rolls of parchment proper-and a demi-Master of the Rolls (Kenyon) for crest. But the text might (let us hope it would have been written equally well) have been for most of its turns and traits written yesterday. "Mr. Rous spoke for two hours to recommend expedition. . . Sir Cecil's tastes, both for poetry and small beer, are well known ; as is the present unfinished state of his newly-fronted house in Pall Mall." These little flashes show the sprightliness of the authors, but soon they rise to greater things and grapple with the "Virtuous Boy" himself. Pert without fire, without experience sage, Young with more art than Shelburne gleaned from age, Too proud from pilfered greatness to descend, Too humble not to call Dundas his friend, The parody of Pope or, at least, of Akenside is good, but the true merit of the thing is that it gives us, as all political satire should give us, the real points in the object which were unpopular with his foes. The lines on Dundas are better still, and it is amus ing to remember that both pieces are thought to be by Ellis. For true to public Virtue's patriot plan, He loves the Minister and not the Man; Alike the advocate of North and Wit, His ready tongue with sophistries at will, Defend, praise, thank, affront him and recall. By opposition he his King shall court; And damn the People's cause by his support. But it is not in this solemn kind of work that the book shows its charms. These lie in such things as the famous passage which, from having been frequently quoted, is probably known to many who do not know another line in the volume. Ah! think what danger on debauch attends: Let Pitt, once drunk, preach temperance to his friends; How as he wandered darkling o'er the plain, His reason drowned in Jenkinson's champagne, A rustic's hand, but righteous fate withstood, Had shed a Premier's for a robber's blood. As these lines are generally quoted, a pleasant prose postscript to them in praise of "the wonderful skill of our poet who could thus bring together an orange girl [for the illustration has crowned a passage on temperance] and the present pure and immaculate Minister, a connection which it is more than probable few of our readers would have in any way suspected," is best. Poor Pitt gets equally laughed at for his proneness to one foible and his abstention from another, a device never to be forgotten by those who lampoon statesmen. This is at once a neat and a quotable hit; of the others on the same subject most are not quotable, though there is an exception in the following very agreeable epigram (on the attempted coalition between the Duke of Portland and Mr. Pitt, which failed because the parties could not agree as to what was "fair and equal"): On fair and equal terms to plan Nor is English the only language in which the hapless Rolle, his chief, and their friends are epigrammatized. Latin, French, Italian, even Greek (very fair Greek, though "without the accents"), figure, and in a parcel of foreign epigrams" it is by no means uninteresting to read by chance on the same page a mention of the 'University of Gottingen" and the name "Casimir." For the wits of The Anti-Jacobin undoubtedly knew their Rolliad well, and one of them, as we have said, had the best cause to know it. 66 The Political Eclogues which follow the Rolliad proper are amusing enough though a little obvious, the best of them being the first, where Laurence turns Formosum pastor into a gross but very funny assault on George Rose. But the Probationary Odes must rank higher, and if they were a little more compressed would rank higher still. They are but half political, and sometimes almost purely literary, till the infandus dolor (let me be permitted to speak in character) smarts again, and a whole sheaf of epigrams is fired at Mr. Pitt's modesty, Sir Cecil Wray's statesmanship, and Dr. Prettyman's apostolic virtues. Poor Tom Warton, a most excellent person and a very nice verse-writer in his day, is a constant butt, probably as the most likely actual candidate, and the Pittites come in for indiscriminate punishment with mere blue-stockings and busy-bodies. Here is imitated the stately style of the man who was not born to be Johnson's biographer, though he thought he was, dropping at the end into the artless verse: Here lies Sir John Hawkins, Here poor Hannah More, after some most improper insinuations, is made to say, "Heavens! what would this amiable baronet [Sir Joseph Mawbey] have been with the education of a curate!" Here Mrs. George Anne Bellamy draws a delightful picture of herself "in a clean hackney coach, drawn by grey horses, with a remarkably civil coachman, fainting in my Cecil's arms." Here Warren Hastings's more laboured manner is hardly caricatured in this description of Major Scott, the advocate who did his very best to lose him his cause: "I can venture to recommend him as an im penetrable arguer; no man's propositions flowing in a more deleterious stream; no man's expressions so little hanging on the thread of opinion." And then come the odes themselves. Wray, Mulgrave, Mawbey, Macpherson, Wraxall, and a score more compete. A very bad and impossible imitation of Dundas's Scotch-the worst thing in the whole book, and showing how necessary it was that Burns and Sir Walter should show Englishmen what Scotch was really like is redeemed a little later by a capital Hibernian pendant due to Fitzpatrick, and supposed to be by Lord Mountmorres, a name of tragic associations in our day, but then that of a favourite butt. This pindaric must have delighted Thackeray, and is very like his own Irish verse. Even better is the ode assigned to Thurlow, where the redoubtable Chancellor's favourite verb accompanies the piece all through with the most delectable crashes, the epode, if I may so call it, containing rather more d-ns than there are lines. And last of all we have the Political Miscellanies, which in a manner complete these odes, and in which most of the epigrams proper and minor pieces above referred to will be found. There is no doubt too much of the thing on the whole, but that is the fate of books that appear in parts and instalments. Clever as The Rolliad is, interesting and stimulating as it proved to its own and the succeeding generations (it may give it an additional zest to some readers to know that in his famous essays on Hastings, Pitt, and others, Macaulay was evidently thinking of it far more often than any definite references show), the little finger of that prince of English lampooners who called himself Peter Pindar was thicker than the loins of any one of its company of wits. I have at different times of my life read Peter thrice right through (a very considerable task, for the standard edition of him, though it is said not to be complete, contains more than two thousand five hundred pages), and each time I have been more convinced that if he had only been a little more of a scholar, and a great deal more of a gentleman, he would have been a very great man indeed. As it is, his mere cleverness is something prodigious. But in the first place, he had very little, or a very intermittent, sense of style, and the ungirt flow of his Muse's gown is often far too slatternly. In the second place, he was a dirty Peter, a scurrilous Peter, a malevolent Peter, a Peter who could beslaver the Prince at the moment that he was assuming airs of republican independence towards the King, a Peter thoroughly coarse in grain and fibre, a Boeotian buzzard masquerading as a Theban eagle. To such bad language does he give irresistible temptation every now and then. And in another minute his shrewdness, his unexpected and delightful quips, the good-humour which in him was consistent with ill-nature, above all, as I have said, his prodigious cleverness, make one almost like, and very much more than almost admire him. John Wolcot was born at Dodbrooke, a suburb of Kingsbridge in Devonshire, which is or was the head if not sole quarters of the manufacture of "white ale"--a rather terrible liquor which is supposed to represent the real Saxon brewage. Perhaps it was due to this that the future Peter was fond of ale all his life, and of cakes likewise. While he was still young he went to live at Fowey, the quaintest if not the prettiest town in |