Foams the wild beach below with maddening rage, With mournful look the seamen eyed the strand, The steersmen now received their last command Those who remain their fearful doom await, And now, lashed on by destiny severe, With horror fraught the dreadful scene drew near 662 In vain, alas! the sacred shades of yore, In vain the cords and axes were prepared, For now the audacious seas insult the yard; High o'er the ship they throw a horrid shade, And o'er her burst, in terrible cascade. Uplifted on the surge, to heaven she flies, Her shattered top half buried in the skies, Then headlong plunging thunders on the ground, Earth groans, air trembles, and the deeps resound! Her giant bulk the dread concussion feels, And quivering with the wound, in torment reels; So reels, convulsed with agonising throes, The bleeding bull beneath the murderer's blows. Again she plunges ; hark! a second shock Tears her strong bottom on the marble rock! Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries, The fated victims shuddering roll their eyes In wild despair; while yet another stroke, With deep convulsion, rends the solid oak: Till, like the mine, in whose infernal cell The lurking demons of destruction dwell, At length asunder torn her frame divides, And crashing spreads in ruin o'er the tides. . . . As o'er the surf the bending mainmast hung, Still on the rigging thirty seamen clung; Some on a broken crag were struggling cast, And there by oozy tangles grappled fast; Awhile they bore the o'erwhelming billows' rage, Unequal combat with their fate to wage; Till all benumbed and feeble, they forego Their slippery hold, and sink to shades below; Some, from the main-yard-arm impetuous thrown On marble ridges, die without a groan; Three with Palemon on their skill depend, And from the wreck on oars and rafts descend; Now on the mountain-wave on high they ride, Then downward plunge beneath the involving tide; nd va the me o Till one, who seems in agony to strive, shore alive: The whirling breakers heave on knew, The rest a speedier end of anguish ss crew, da And pressed the stony beach-a lifele do depa Next, O unhappy chief! the eternal more Of heaven decreed thee to the briny tomb What scenes of misery torment thy view What painful struggles of thy dying crew Thy perished hopes all buried in the floo O'erspread with corses, red with human d pard! So pierced with anguish hoary Priam gaz the p When Troy's imperial domes in ruin blaz illust While he, severest sorrow doomed to feel of the Expired beneath the victor's murdering sounde Thus with his helpless partners to the lasion of Sad refuge! Albert grasps the floating mit in a His soul could yet sustain this mortal blossrs Bl But droops, alas! beneath superior woe and la For now strong nature's sympathetic chai larke & Tugs at his yearning heart with powerful his e His faithful wife, for ever doomed to mo a For him, alas! who never shall return; Sintmen To black adversity's approach exposed, his voy With want, and hardships unforeseen, er et the His lovely daughter, left without a friend corru Her innocence to succour and defend, By youth and indigence set forth a prey ROBERT LLOYD. ROBERT LLOYD, the friend of Cowper and Churchill, was born in London in 1733. His father was under-master at Westminster School. He distinguished himself by his talents at Cambridge, but was irregular in his habits. After completing his education, he became an usher under his father. The wearisome routine of this life soon disgusted him, and he attempted to earn a subsistence by his literary talents. His poem called The Actor attracted some notice, and was the precursor of Churchill's Rosciad. The style is light and easy, and the observations generally correct and spirited. By contributing to periodical works as an essayist, a poet, and stage critic, Lloyd picked up a precarious subsistence, but his means were thoughtlessly squandered in company with Churchill and other wits upon town.' He brought out two indifferent theatrical pieces, published his poems by subscription, and edited the St James's Magazine, to which Colman, Bonnel Thornton, and others contributed. The magazine failed, and Lloyd was cast into prison for debt. Churchill generously allowed him a guinea a week, as well as a servant; and endeavoured to raise a subscription for the purpose of extricating him from his embarrassments. Churchill died in November 1764. Lloyd,' says Southey, 'had been apprised of his danger; but when the news of his death was somewhat abruptly announced to him, as he was sitting at dinner, he was seized with a sudden sickness, and saying: "I shall follow poor Charles," took to his bed, from which he never rose again; dying, if ever man died, of a broken heart. The tragedy did not end here: Churchill's favourite sister, who is said to have possessed much of her brother's sense, and spirit, and genius, and to have been betrothed to Lloyd, attended him during his illness; and, sinking under the double loss, soon followed her brother and her lover to the grave.' Lloyd, in conjunction with Colman, parodied the Odes of Gray and Mason, and the humour of their burlesques is not tinctured with malignity. Indeed, this unfortunate young poet seems to have been one of the gentlest of witty observers and lively satirists; he was ruined by the friendship of Churchill and the Nonsense Club, and not by the force of an evil nature. The vivacity of his style-which both Churchill and Cowper copied-may be seen from the followres du ing short extract: mixed to Though for a while with easy air Too careless of the means to live; O glorious trade! for wit's a trade, Where men are ruined more than made ! Let crazy Lee, neglected Gay, The shabby Otway, Dryden gray, Those tuneful servants of the NineNot that I blend their names with mine→→ Repeat their lives, their works, their fame, And teach the world some useful shame. But bad as the life of a hackney poet and critic seems to have been in Lloyd's estimation, the situation of a school-usher was as little to be desired, and so thought Goldsmith : Wretchedness of a School-usher. Were I at once empowered to shew For one, it hurts me to the soul, CHARLES CHURCHILL. A second Dryden was supposed to have arisen in Churchill, when he published his satirical poem, the Rosciad, in 1761. The impression was continued by his reply to the critical reviewers, shortly afterwards; and his Epistle to Hogarth, the Prophecy of Famine, Night, and passages in his other poems-all thrown off in haste to serve the purpose of the day-evinced great vigour and facility of versification, and a breadth and boldness of personal invective that drew instant attention to their author. Though Cowper, from early predilections, had a high opinion of Churchill, and thought he was 'indeed a poet,' we cannot now consider the author of the Rosciad as more than a special pleader or pamphleteer in verse. He seldom reaches the heart-except in some few lines of penitential fervour-and he never ascended to the higher regions of imagination, then trod by Collins, Gray, and Akenside. With the beauties of external nature he had not the slightest sympathy. He died before he had well attained the prime of life; yet there is no youthful enthusiasm about his works, nor any indications that he sighed for a higher fame than that of being the terror of actors and artists, noted for his libertine eccentricities, and distinguished for his devotion to Wilkes. That he misapplied strong original talents in following out these pitiful or unworthy objects of his ambition is undeniable. The 'fatal facility' of his verse, and his unscrupulous satire of living individuals and passing events, had the effect of making all London ring from side to side' with his applause, at a time when the real poetry of the age could hardly obtain either publishers or readers. Excepting Marlowe, the dramatic poet, scarcely any English author of reputation has been more unhappy in his life and end than Charles Churchill. He was the son of a clergyman in Westminster, where he was born in 1731. After attending Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge--which he quitted abruptly-he made a clandestine marriage with a young lady in Westminster, and was assisted by his father, till he was ordained and settled in the curacy of Rainham, in Essex. His father died in 1758, and the poet was appointed his successor in the curacy and lectureship of St John's at Westminster. This transition, which promised an accession of comfort and respectability, proved the bane of poor Churchill. He was in his twentyseventh year, and his conduct had been up to this period irreproachable. He now, however, renewed his intimacy with Lloyd and other school-companions, and launched into a career of dissipation and extravagance. His poetry drew him into notice; and he not only disregarded his lectureship, but he laid aside the clerical costume, and appeared in the extreme of fashion, with a blue coat, gold-laced hat, and ruffles. The dean of Westminster remonstrated with him against this breach of clerical propriety, and his animadversions were seconded by the poet's parishioners. Churchill affected to ridicule this prudery, and Lloyd made it the subject of an epigram: To Churchill, the bard, cries the Westminster dean, mean? 'Tis shameful, irreverent-you must keep to church rules. This If wise ones, I will; and if not, they're for fools. If reason don't bind me, I'll shake off all fetters; To be black and all black, I shall leave to my betters. The dean and the congregation were, however, too powerful, and Churchill found it necessary to resign the lectureship. His ready pen still threw off at will his popular satires, and he plunged into the grossest debaucheries. These excesses he attempted to justify in a poetical epistle to Lloyd, entitled Night, in which he revenges himself on prudence and the world by railing at them in good set terms. 'This vindication proceeded,' says his biographer, 'on the exploded doctrine, that the barefaced avowal of vice is less culpable than the practice of it under a hypocritical asindividual is, we conceive, tolerably equal; but the sumption of virtue. The measure of guilt in the sanction and dangerous example afforded in the former case, renders it, in a public point of view, an evil of tenfold magnitude. The poet's irregularities affected his powers of composition, and his poem of The Ghost, published at this time, was an incoherent and tiresome production. A greater evil, too, was his acquaintance with Wilkes, unfortunately equally conspicuous for public faction and private debauchery. Churchill assisted his new associate in the North Briton, and received the profit arising from its sale. circumstance rendered him of importance enough to be included with Wilkes in the list of those whom the messengers had verbal instructions to apprehend under the general warrant issued for that purpose, the execution of which gave rise to the most popular and only beneficial part of the warm contest that ensued with government. Churchill was with Wilkes at the time the latter was apprehended, and himself only escaped owing to the messenger's ignorance of his person, and to the presence of mind with which Wilkes addressed him by the name of Thomson.'* set about his satire, the Prophecy of Famine, The poet now which, like Wilkes's North Briton, was specially directed against the Scottish nation. The outlawry of Wilkes separated the friends, but they kept up a correspondence, and Churchill continued to be a keen political satirist. The excesses of his daily life remained equally conspicuous. Hogarth, who was opposed to Churchill for being a friend of Wilkes, characteristically exposed his habits by caricaturing the satirist in the form of a bear dressed canonically, with ruffles at his paws, and holding a pot of porter. Churchill took revenge in a fierce and sweeping 'epistle' to Hogarth, which is said to have caused him the most exquisite pain. After separating from his wife, and forming an unhappy connection with another female, the daughter of a Westminster tradesman, wretched Churchill's career drew to a sad and premature close. In October 1764 he went to France to pay a visit to his friend Wilkes, and was seized at Boulogne with a Life of Churchill prefixed to works (London, 1804). When Churchill entered the room, Wilkes was in custody of the messenger. 'Good-morning, Mr Thomson, said Wilkes to him. How does Mrs Thomson do? Does she dine in the country?' Churchill took the hint as readily as it had been given. He replied that Mrs Thomson was waiting for him, and that he only came, for a his leave, hastened home, secured his papers, retired into the moment, to ask him how he did. Then almost directly he took country, and eluded all search. fever, which proved fatal on the 4th of November. With his clerical profession Churchill had thrown off his belief in Christianity, and Southey mentions, that though he made his will only the day before his death, there is in it not the slightest expression of religious faith or hope. So highly popular and productive had his satires proved, that he was enabled to bequeath an annuity of sixty pounds to his widow, and fifty to the more unhappy woman whom he had latterly abused, and some surplus remained to his sons. The poet was buried at Dover, and some of his gay associates placed over his grave a stone, on which was engraved a line from one of his own poems: Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies. The enjoyment may be doubted, and still more the taste of this inscription. It is certain that Churchill expressed his compunction for parts of his conduct, in verses that evidently came from the heart: Remorse. Look back! a thought which borders on despair, The most ludicrous, and, on the whole, the best of Churchill's satires, is his Prophecy of Famine, a Scots pastoral, inscribed to Wilkes. The Earl of Bute's administration had directed the enmity of all disappointed patriots and keen partisans against the Scottish nation. Even Johnson and Junius descended to this petty national prejudice, and Churchill revelled in it with such undisguised exaggeration and broad humour, that the most saturnine or sensitive of our countrymen must have laughed at its absurdity. This unique pastoral opens as follows: A Scots Pastoral. Two boys whose birth, beyond all question, springs Jockey, whose manly high cheek-bones to crown, With freckles spotted flamed the golden down, With meikle art could on the bagpipes play, In the same poem, Churchill thus alludes to himself: Me, whom no muse of heavenly birth inspires, Who would, but cannot, with a master's skill, The characters of Garrick, &c. in the Rosciad, have now ceased to interest; but some of these rough pen-and-ink sketches of Churchill are happily executed. Smollett, who, as Churchill believed, had attacked him in the Critical Review, he alludes to with mingled approbation and ridicule: Whence could arise this mighty critic spleen, In walks of humour, in that cast of style, The birthday of the old Chevalier. It used to be a great object with the gardener of a Scottish Jacobite family of those days to have the Stuart emblem in blow by the tenth of June. Where a beginning, middle, and an end In Night, Churchill thus gaily addressed his friend Lloyd on the proverbial poverty of poets: What is 't to us if taxes rise or fall? The reputation of Churchill was also an aërial structure. No English poet,' says Southey,' had ever enjoyed so excessive and so short-lived a popularity; and indeed no one seems more thoroughly to have understood his own powers; there is no indication in any of his pieces that he could have done anything better than the thing he did. To Wilkes he said that nothing came out till he began to be pleased with it himself; but, to the public, he boasted of the haste and carelessness with which his verses were poured forth. periods-his manly character and appearancehis great virtues and strong prejudices—his early and severe struggles, illustrating his own noble verse Slow rises worth by poverty depressed his love of argument and society, into which he poured the treasures of a rich and full mind— his wit, repartee, and brow-beating his rough manners and kind heart-his curious household, in which were congregated the lame, blind, and despised-his very looks, gesticulation, and dress -have all been brought so vividly before us by his biographer, Boswell, that to readers of every class Johnson is as well known as any member of their own family. His heavy form seems still to haunt Fleet Street and the Strand, and he has stamped his memory on the remote islands of the Hebrides. In literature, his influence has been scarcely less extensive. No prose writer of that day escaped the contagion of his peculiar style. He banished for a long period the naked simplicity of Swift, and the idiomatic graces of Addison; he depressed the literature and poetry of imagination, while he elevated that of the understanding; he based criticism on strong sense and solid judgment, not on scholastic subtleties and refinement; and though some of the higher qualities and attributes of genius eluded his grasp and observation, the withering scorn and invective with which he assailed all affected sentimentalism, immorality, and licentiousness, introduced a pure and healthful and invigorating atmosphere into the crowded walks of literature. These are solid and substantial benefits which should weigh down errors of Had I the power, I could not have the time, While spirits flow, and life is in her prime, taste or the caprices of a temperament constituWithout a sin 'gainst pleasure, to design tionally prone to melancholy and disease, and A plan, to methodise each thought, each line, which was little sweetened by prosperity or Highly to finish, and make every grace applause at that period of life when the habits are In itself charming, take new charms from place. formed and the manners become permanent. Nothing of books, and little known of men, a man, Johnson was an admirable representative When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen ; of the Englishman-as an author, his course was Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down, singularly pure, high-minded, and independent. Rough as they run, discharge them on the town. He could boast with more truth than Burke, that ' he had no arts but manly arts.' At every step in Popularity which is easily gained, is lost as his progress, his passport was talent and virtue; easily; such reputations resembling the lives of and when the royal countenance and favour were insects, whose shortness of existence is compen- at length extended to him, it was but a ratificasated by its proportion of enjoyment. He perhaps tion by the sovereign of the wishes and opinions imagined that his genius would preserve his sub-entertained by the best and wisest of the nation. jects, as spices preserve a mummy, and that the individuals whom he had eulogised or stigmatised would go down to posterity in his verse, as an old admiral comes home from the West Indies in a puncheon of rum: he did not consider that the rum is rendered loathsome, and that the spices with which the Pharaohs and Potiphars were embalmed, wasted their sweetness in the catacombs. But, in this part of his conduct, there was no want of worldly prudence: he was enriching himself by hasty writings, for which the immediate sale was in proportion to the bitterness and personality of the satire.' As Johnson was born at Lichfield, September 18, 1709. His father was a bookseller. In his nineteenth year, he was placed at Pembroke College, Oxford. Misfortunes in trade happened to the elder Johnson, and Samuel was compelled to leave the university without a degree. He had been only fourteen months at Oxford, but during that time had distinguished himself by translating Pope's Messiah into Latin verse. He was a short time usher in a school at Market Bosworth; but marrying a widow, Mrs Porter-who was in her forty-eighth year (Johnson himself was twentyseven) he set up a private academy at Edial, near his native city. He had only three pupils, one of whom was David Garrick. After an unsuccessful career of a year and a half, Johnson went to London, accompanied by Garrick. He had written part of his tragedy of Irene, hoping to get it brought on the stage, but it was refused. He now commenced author by profession, contributing essays, reviews, &c. to the Gentleman's Magazine. |