Roscommons, the Halifaxes, the Grenvilles, the Lyttletons of the last age, and the still minor class of Thurlows, Herberts, and others of the present generation, have been tolerated as poets, only because they were peers,' (Vol. iii. p. 262.)

A contempt of grammar, as of nobility, may be observed to relieve the sense and elegance of this passage. But this is a department of Mr Tooke's merits too extensive to enter upon. When he talks of a masterly but caustic satire,' (Vol. i. p. xl,) and of plunging deeper and more irrecoverably into,' &c., (Vol. i. p. xli,) we do not stop to ask what he can possibly mean. But his use of the prepositions and conjunctions is really curious. His and to which we would refer our readers accordingly, and to (whose thanks we shall entitle ourselves for so doing,' (Vol. iii. p. 157;) his and from which but little information could be collected, he was at the same time confident that none others existed, and which the lapse of time has confirmed,' (Vol. iii. p. 296 ;) are of perpetual recurrence in the shape of and who, or but which, and may be said to form the peculiarity of his style. On even Mr Pickering's Aldine press, a genius of blundering has laid its evil touch. The errors in the printing of the book are execrable. Not a page is correctly pointed from first to last; numbers of lines in the text (as at vol. iii. pp. 216-17) are placed out of their order; and it is rare when a name is rightly given. But enough of a distasteful subject. We leave Mr Tooke and pass to Churchill.

Exactly a hundred years after the birth of Dryden, Charles Churchill was born. More than a hundred years were between the two races of men. In 1631, Hampden was consoling Eliot in his prison, and discussing with Pym the outraged Petition of Right; in 1731, Walpole was flying at Townshend's throat, and suggesting to Gay the quarrels of Lockit and Peachum. Within the reach of Dryden's praise and blame, there came a Cromwell and a Shaftesbury; a Wilkes and a Sandwich exhausted Churchill's. There is more to affect a writer's genius in personal and local influences of this kind, than he would himself be willing to allow. If, even in the failures of the first and greatest of these satirists, there is a dash of largeness and power; there is never wholly absent from the most consummate achievements of his successor, a something we must call conventional. But the right justice has not been done to Churchill. Taken with the good and evil of his age, he was a very remarkable person.

An English clergyman, who, in conjunction with his rectory of Rainham, in Essex, held the curacy and lectureship of St

John the Evangelist in Westminster, from 1733 to his death in 1758, was the father of Charles Churchill. He had two younger sons; William, who afterward selected the church for his profession, and passed a long, quiet, unobtrusive life within it; and John, brought up to the business of medicine. The elder, named Charles after himself, he from the first especially designed for his own calling; and sent him in 1739, when eight years old, as a day-boy to Westminster school. Nichols was the head master, and the second master was (not Lloyd, as Mr Tooke would inform us, but) Johnson, afterwards a bishop. Vincent Bourne was usher of the fifth form, and Dr Pierson Lloyd, (after some years second master,) a man of fine humour as well as rare worth and learning, was usher at the fourth. Churchill, judging from the earliest notice of him, must have been already a robust, manly, broad-faced little fellow when he entered the school; all who in later life remembered him, spoke of the premature growth and fulness both of his body and mind; and he was not long in assuming the place in his boy's circle, which quick-sighted lads are not slow to concede to a deserving and a daring claimant. He was fond of play; but was a hard worker when he turned to work, and a successful. There is a story of one of his punishments by flogging, which only increased and embittered the temper that provoked it; but of a literary task by way of punishment, for which the offender received public thanks from the masters of the school. He could do well if he would,' was the admission of his enemies; and the good Dr Lloyd loved him.

There were then a number of remarkable boys at Westminster. Bonnell Thornton was already in the upper forms; but George Colman, Robert Lloyd, Richard Cumberland, and Warren Hastings, were with few years' interval Churchill's contemporaries; and there was one mild, shrinking, delicate lad of his own age, though two years younger in the school, afraid to lift his eyes above the shoestrings of the upper boys, but encouraged to raise them as high as Churchill's heart. He stood by Cowper in these days; and the author of the Task and the Table-Talk repaid him in a sorer need. Indeed, there was altogether a manly tone of feeling among these Westminster scholars. If they were false to some promises of their youth when they grew to manhood, they were true to all that pledged them to each other. Never, save when two examples occurred too flagrant for avoidance, in a profligate Duke and a hypocritical Parson, did Churchill lift his pen against a schoolfellow. Mr Tooke says that the commencement of a satire against Thornton and Colman was found among his papers; but there is no proof of this, and

we doubt, in common with Southey, the alleged desertion of Lloyd which is said to have suggested the satire. Even Warren Hastings profited by his old connexion with Westminster, when Wilkes deserted his supporters in the House of Commons to defend the playfellow of his dead friend; and the irritable Cumberland so warmed to the memory of his school companion, as to call him always, fondly, the Dryden of his age.

Literature itself had become a bond of union with these youths before they left the Westminster cloisters. The TableTalk tells of the little poets at Westminster,' and how they strive to set a distich upon six and five.' Even the boredom of school exercises, more rife in English composition, then than since, did not check the scribbling propensity. All the lads we have named had a decisive turn that way; and little Colman, emulating his betters, addressed his cousin Pulteney from the fifth form with the air of a literary veteran. For, in the prevailing dearth of great poetry, verse-writing was cultivated much: much encouraged. It had become, as Lady Mary Montagu said a few years before, as common as taking snuff. Others compared it to an epidemical distemper;-a sort of murrain. Beyond all doubt, it was the rage. Poets increase and multiply to that 'stupendous degree, you see them at every turn, in embroidered coats, and pink-coloured topknots.' Nor was it probable, as to Churchill himself, that he thought the dress less attractive than the verse tagging. But his father, as we have said, had other views with respect to him. He must shade his fancies with a more sober colour, and follow the family profession.

It was an unwise resolve. It was one of those resolves which more frequently mar than make a life. The control of inclination to a falsehood is a common parent's crime; not the less grievous when mistaken for a virtue. The stars do not more surely keep their courses, than an ill-regulated manhood will follow a misdirected youth. This boy had noble qualities for a better chosen career. Thus early he had made it manifest that he could see for himself and feel for others; that he had strong sensibility and energy of intellect; that, where he had faith, he had steadiness of purpose and enthusiasm: but that, closely neighbouring his power, were vehemence, will, and passion; and that these made him confident, inflexible, and hard to be controlled. In the bad discipline of such a mind, one of two results was sure. He would resist or yield: in the one case, boasting exemption from vice, become himself the victim of the worst of vices; in the other, with violent recoil from the hypocrisies, outrage the proprieties of life. The proof soon came. Churchill had given evidence of scholarship in Latin and Greek

as early as his fifteenth year, when, offering himself a candidate for the Westminster foundation, he went in head of the election; but on standing for the studentship to Merton College, Oxford, three years later, he was rejected. Want of learning, premature indulgence of satirical tastes, and other as unlikely causes, have been invented to explain the rejection: there is little doubt that its real cause was the discovery of a marriage imprudently contracted some months before, with a Westminster girl named Scot, and accomplished within the rules of the Fleet. A marriage most imprudent-most unhappy. It disqualified him for the studentship. It introduced his very boyhood to grave responsibilities he was powerless to discharge, almost to comprehend. What self-help he might have exerted against the unwise plans of his father, it crippled and finally destroyed. There is hardly a mistake or suffering in his after life, which it did not originate, or leave him without the means of repelling. That it was entered into at so early an age; that it was effected by the scandalous facilities of the Fleet-were among its evil incidents, but not the worst. It encumbered him with a wife from whom he could not hope for sympathy, encouragement, or assistance in any good thing to whom he could administer them as little. Neither understood the other; or had that real affection which would have supplied all needful knowledge.

The good clergyman received them into his house soon after the discovery was made. The compromise seems to have been, that Churchill should no longer oppose his father's wishes, in regard to that calling of the church to which he afterwards bitterly described himself decreed, ere it was known that he · should learn to read.' He was entered, but never resided, at Trinity, in Cambridge. There was a necessary interval before the appointed age of ordination, (for which he could qualify without a degree,) and he passed it quietly: the first twelve months in his father's house; the rest in a retirement, for which 'family reasons' are named but not explained, in the north of England. In that retirement, it is said, he varied church reading with favourite poetical amusements;' with what unequal apportionment it might not be difficult to guess. The already congenial charm he may be supposed to have found in the stout declamation of Juvenal; the sly and insinuating sharpness of Horace, and the indignant eloquence of Dryden-had little rivalry to fear from the fervid imagination of Taylor, the copious eloquence of Barrow, or the sweet persuasiveness of South.

In 1753 he visited London, to take possession, it is said, of a small fortune in right of his wife; but there is nothing to show that he got the possession, however small. It is more apparent

that the great city tempted him sorely; that boyish tastes were once more freely indulged; and that his now large and stalwart figure was oftener seen at theatres than chapels. It was a great theatrical time. Drury Lane was in its strength, with Garrick, Mossop, Mrs Pritchard, Palmer, Woodward, Shutes, Yates, and Mrs Clive. Even in its comparative weakness, Covent Garden could boast of Barry, Smith, Sparks, and Macklin-of Mrs Cibber and Mrs Vincent, and, not seldom, of Quin, who still lingered on the stage he had quitted formally two or three years before, and seemed as loth to depart from really, as Churchill, on these stolen evenings of enjoyment, from his favourite front row of the pit. Nevertheless, the promise to his father was kept; and, having now reached the canonical age, he returned to the north in deacon's orders; whence he removed, with little delay, to the curacy of South Cadbury in Somersetshire. Here he officiated till 1756, when he was ordained priest, and passed to his father's curacy of Rainham.

Both these ordinations without a degree, are urged in special proof of his good character and reputation for singular learning; but there is reason to suspect his father's influence more powerful than either. His behavour,' says Dr Kippis, writing in the Biographia Britannica, gained him the love and esteem ' of his parishioners; and his sermons, though somewhat raised ' above the level of his audience, were commended and followed. What chiefly disturbed him, was the smallness of his income.' This, though connected with a statement as to a Welsh living now rejected, has in effect been always repeated since, and may or may not be true. It is perhaps a little strange, if his sermons were thus elevated, commended, and followed, that no one recognised their style, or could in the least commend them, when a series of ten were published with his name eight years later; but the alleged smallness of his income admits of no kind of doubt. He had now two sons, and, as he says himself, prayed and starved on forty pounds a-year.' He opened a school. It was bitter drudgery. He wondered, he afterwards told his friends, that he had ever submitted to it; but necessities more bitter overmastered him. What solid help this new toil might have given was yet uncertain, when, in 1758, his father died, and, in respect to his memory, his parishioners elected the curate of Rainham to succeed him. At the close of 1758, Charles Churchill was settled in Westminster, at the age of twenty, seven, curate and lecturer of St John's.

It was not a very brilliant change, nor enabled him yet to dispense with very mean resources. The emoluments of his 'situation,' observes Dr Kippis-who was connected with the