PAUL WHITEHEAD,

THE POET TAILOR.

"He lived a poet in this town
(If we may term our modern writers poets),
Sharp-witted, bitter-tongued, his pen of steel.
His ink was temper'd with the biting juice,
And extracts of the bitterest weeds that grew.
He never wrote but when the elements

Of fire and water tilted in his brain."

HEYWOOD: Fair Maid of the Exchange.

AMONG the tailors who have been authors, Paul Whitehead takes a very respectable rank; which is more, I am sorry to say, than he does among men. The career of the two Whiteheads has a moral in it. William, the son of a Cambridge baker, was, like Paul, the tailor's son, a most successful tufthunter; but then he hunted chiefly after patricians of principle, of good principle. William was a gentle lad; he walked through the university of his native city with quiet credit, and passed into Lord Grey's family as private tutor; where he taught mildly, and wrote classical tragedies of so soporific a nature, that the reading of them might safely be recommended to the sleepless by hypnologists. William the baker was a highly respectable and never-too-soon-to-beforgotten individual.

It is otherwise with roystering Paul the tailor. Chapelyard, Holborn, was the cradle (in 1709) of this boisterous and biting poet. His father would have been content to see him take measures to follow his example; but as Herva

gault, the first pseudo-Dauphin, quitted his father's board. to make assault upon the throne of Capet, so Paul, backed by his friends, aimed at the realm of rhyme, and would wear his father's coats, but would not make them. His sire apprenticed him to a mercer; the ambitious son went and entered himself at the Temple.

Paul was one of those daring wits whom profane men most admire; and as the young tailor's style was one which had respect for neither Olympus nor the mortals, he became a laureate, like William the Baker, but not, like him, poetlaureate to the King.

Paul of Castle-yard was laureate to the "Bucks." He was a member of the most reprobate clubs of the day. He was a member of the brotherhood of Medenham Abbey,not of the pious and pot-heaving Cistercians, who gurgled their throats with good old wine, but of the God-denying and profligate crew that had Sir Francis Dashwood for their prior. Paul was the Parny of this and similar sets; and when his patrons required a lay against loyalty, a rhyme against royalty, a metrical kick at kings, songs against statesmen, or diatribes against dunces, the Muse of the tailor's clever boy was ever ready for the nonce. For clever he was, despite the abuse of Churchill-himself very far from immaculate. If Paul was a reprobate, Churchill was that, and a parson to boot,-two professions which should never be united in one and the same individual. And yet Churchill wrote

"May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)

Be born a Whitehead, and baptized a Paul!"

The man who wrote these lines was in every way inferior to him against whom they were levelled; certainly inferior to him in talent, though it perhaps may be conceded that he excelled him in vice, power of abuse, and ill-nature.

Paul the tailor was to Churchill, the reverend bruiser, what Cobbett was to Hunt. The first had argument in his

assertions; the latter had as little logic as humanity. Paul, too, had taste, and imitated only models of the rarest beauty; and this imitation was better than a low originality without taste at all. His thoughts were marked by a manly strength, and his phrases abound in a rich vein of poetical expression. His quarry was folly wherever found, and particularly "the big, rich, mighty dunces of the State." Not that dunces, as he said, were to be found there only

:

"Dulness no more roosts only near the sky,

But senates, drawing-rooms, with garrets vie;
Plump Peers and breadless bards alike are dull,
St. James's and Rag Fair club fool for fool."

And here is a pattern of the fashion after which Paul laid his yard about the ears of one who was "by birth a senator, by fate a fool:".

“Full placed and pension'd, see Horatio stands!
Begrimed his face, unpurified his hands.
To decency he scorns all nice pretence,
And reigns firm foe to cleanliness and sense.
How did Horatio Britain's cause advance!
How shines the sloven and buffoon of France!
In senates now, how scold, how rave, how roar,
Of treaties run the tedious train-trow o'er!
How blunder out whate'er should be conceal'd,
And how keep secret what should be reveal'd!
True child of dulness! see him, Goddess, claim
Power next thyself, as next in birth and fame."

The author was a persecuted man, rather that he was considered a tailor, who had no authority to sit at home and comment on what was done "i' the Capitol," than that he was a satirist. Pope was more severe; but Pope was a gentleman, and was held unassailable. If Paul was prosecuted, it was that Pope, in the penalties inflicted on the humbler bard, might see the perils which did himself environ. Poor Paul nevertheless grumbled at being thus made a scapegoat, and he said thereupon:

"Pope writes unhurt; but know 'tis different quite

To beard the lion, and to crush the mite.

Safe may he dash the statesman in each line;

Those dread his satire who dare punish mine!"

So wrote the Tory tailor who abused the Whigs, who were at that time most flourishing at court, and most arrogant in drawing-rooms. The day came when the Tories took root at court, and swaggered in saloons: and then, sooth to say, court life and lounging in boudoirs seemed no longer reprehensible in the eyes of the satirist. When he abused the throne, he never expected to be allowed to make a congé at the foot of it. Benedick, in a similar style, when he abused matrimony, never expected to be a married man. And, besides, we may allow in well-abused Paul,-once pillowed on his sire's sleeve-board,-the tergiversation of principle which was so coolly practised by such mighty fine gentlemen as Dryden, and that insufferably impudent and dishonest fop, Waller.

One at least of Paul's works led to a public demonstration of some importance; and I may as well notice it here as where it would otherwise as naturally come under the head of "Masks." Walpole, writing to Sir Horace Mann, in November, 1741, says: "I believe I told you that Vernon's birthday passed quietly; but it was not designed to be pacific, for at twelve at night, eight gentlemen, dressed like sailors, and masked, went round Covent Garden with a drum, beating for a volunteer mob; but it did not take, and they retired to a great supper, that was prepared for them at the Bedford Head, and ordered by Whitehead, the author of Manners.""

In this last piece the author had committed onslaught on some members of the House of Lords; the latter assembly summoned and imprisoned Dodsley the publisher, Whitehead himself having absconded. The publisher confessed that he had not read the tailor's strains, but that, as the

work was a satire, he had compelled the author to affix his name to the title-page, and take the responsibility. One of the libelled Lords, Essex, moved the discharge of Dodsley; and not only Whitehead, but Pope, was kept quiet by fear of prosecution.

Whitehead had already known what imprisonment was. He had, like many a foolish youth, been ambitious of maintaining an acquaintance with the actors, and he was particularly intimate with Fleetwood the manager. He had not read the admonitory remark of the Wise King, that he who goeth security for his neighbour shall smart for it; and the consequence of putting his name to a bond ultimately placed his person in bonds also, and he expiated in the Fleet his act of generous folly.

But he soon recovered from the effects of this. He was something of a beau, and he did what beaux were wont to do,—married an heiress. The lady was Anne Dyer, daughter of an Essex baronet, Sir Swinnerton Dyer. She was homely and somewhat imbecile, but she had ten thousand pounds,-" dix milles vertus en louis bien comptés,”—and Paul always regarded her as a woman who had rendered him some little service. As duty was then accounted of, this was acting with most singular uprightness.

He now took to what Mrs. Partington calls his "opium cum digitalis," and ceased to publish, though not to write. His republican friends attacked him as a renegade; his royalist foes assailed him as an atheist; and Paul laughed at both. To show however that he had strength if he chose to exert it, he wrote his 'Gymnasiad,' a punching philippic against boxing; and he dedicated it to Boughton the "bruiser,”—and all this in the face of fashion, which then took prize-fighters by the arm, and walked with them in the Mall, proud of the acquaintance.

The atheistical gentleman who turned his satire from the Cabinet to the "ropes," was well rewarded by Ministers;