fesses them. It may have been with a bitter sense of their intensity that he used the energetic phrase, afterwards remembered by his publisher- blotting was like cutting away one's own 'flesh.' He did not particularly affect the life of a man of Letters, and, for the most part, avoided that kind of society; for which Dr Johnson pronounced him a blockhead. Boswell

remonstrated. Well, sir,' said Johnson, I will acknowledge 'that I have a better opinion of him than I once had; for he has shown more fertility than I expected. To be sure, he is a tree 'that cannot produce good fruit: he only bears crabs. But, sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better than a tree which produces only a few.'

Such as it was-and it can afford this passing touch of blightthe tree was now planted on Acton Common. After the departure of Wilkes, he had moved from his Richmond residence into a house there, described by the first of his biographers, two months after his death, to have been furnished with extreme elegance; and where he is said, by the same worthy scribe, to have kept his post'chaise, saddle-horses, and pointers; and to have fished, fowled, hunted, coursed, and lived in an independent, easy manner,' He did not however so live, as to be unable carefully to lay aside an honourable provision for all who were dependent on him. This, it is justly remarked by Southey, was his meritorious motive for that greediness of gain with which he was reproached; as if it were any reproach to a successful author that he doled out his writings in the way most advantageous to himself, and fixed upon them as high a price as his admirers were willing to pay. Cowper has made allusion to some of these points, in his fine delineation of his old friend and school-fellow in the Table Talk.

The Author, published almost contemporaneously with the Duellist, had the rare good fortune to please even his critics. Horace Walpole could now admit, that even when the satirist was not assailing a Holland or a Warburton, the world were transported' with his works, and his numbers were indeed ‘like Dryden's.' The Monthly Reviewers sent forth a frank eulogium: even the Critical found it best to forget their ancient grudge. And in the admirable qualities not without reason assigned to it, the Author seems to us to have been much surpassed by his next performance, Gotham.

When Cowper fondly talked, as it was his pleasure and his pride to do, of Churchill, the great Churchill, for he well deserved the name,' it was proof of his taste that he dwelt with delight on this noble and beautiful poem.' Its object was not clearly comprehended at the first, but, as it proceeded, became

evident. It was an Idea of a Patriot King in verse; and in verse, of which, with all its carelessness, we hold with Cowper that few exacter writers of his class have equalled, for its bold and daring strokes of fancy; its numbers so hazardously ventured upon and so happily finished; its matter so compressed and yet so 'clear; its colouring so sparingly laid on and yet with such a beau'tiful effect.' We would have quoted much, and regret that we can but quote a fragment of one passage. It is brief and unconnected, but part of a fine strain of descriptive poetry. The reader's national pride will not intercept his admiration of the wit of the line which precedes the fine picture of the cedar; and he will admire the excellent and subtle art with which the verse seconds the sense.

'The hedge-row elm; the pine, of mountain race;
The fir, the Scotch fir, never out of place;
The cedar, whose top mates the highest cloud,
Whilst his old father Lebanon grows proud
Of such a child, and his vast body laid
Out many a mile, enjoys the filial shade;
The oak, when living, monarch of the wood
The English oak, which, dead, commands the flood!

*

**

The sun, who, travelling in eastern skies,

d;

Fresh, full of strength, just risen from his bed,

Though in Jove's pastures they were born and bred,

With voice and whip, can scarce make his steeds stir,

Step by step, up the perpendicular;

Who, at the hour of eve, panting for rest,

Rolls on amain, and gallops down the west
As fast as Jehu, oil'd for Ahab's sin,

Drove for a crown, or postboys for an inn.'

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Gotham was less successful than the more personal satires, and the author might have felt, as his great high priest of all the nine' did, when he remembered the success of MacFlecknoe, amid the evil days on which the Religio Laici and Hind and Panther had fallen. Nothing ever equalled a satire for a sale, said the old bookseller Johnson to his son Samuel-a good swinge ing satire, or a Sacheverell's Trial!' Churchill was reminded of it by his quondam friend Foote; but the advice need hardly have been given. So timely a subject came unexpectedly to band, that in no case could Churchill have resisted it. Lord Sandwich became a candidate for the high stewardship of Cambridge University. I thank you,' wrote Lord Bath to Colman, for the Candidate, which is, in my opinion, the 'severest, and the best, of all Churchill's works. He has a great genius, and is an excellent poet.' Notwithstanding

which praise from such a critic, we shall not hesitate to aver, that the Candidate really is an excellent poem, with lines as fine in it as any from Churchill's hand. Such are those wherein the miseries of evil counsel to royalty are dwelt upon; and Kings are described as 'made to draw their breath in darkness thicker 'than the shades of Death.' The portrait of Lord Sandwich is also excellent, and has several fine touches; though, undoubtedly, were we to compare it with that of Buckingham by Dryden, it might seem as a mere impressive and startling list of materials for satire, beside the subtler extract of the very spirit of satire itself. But it is writing of a most rare order.

The Farewell, and the Times, (the latter only to be referred to as Dryden refers to some of the nameless productions of Juvenal, tragical provocations tragically revenged,) now followed in rapid succession; and Independence, the last work published while he lived, appeared at the close of September 1764. It is a final instance of Mr Tooke's misfortunes in criticism, that though he admits this poem to display vigour' in some scattered passages, he sets it down as slovenly in composition, hacknied in subject, and common-place in thought.' It is very far from this! A noble passage at the commencement, is worthy of Ben Jonson himself, and very much in his manner.

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• What is a Lord? Doth that plain simple word
Contain some magic spell? As soon as heard,
Like an alarum bell on Night's dull ear,

Doth it strike louder, and more strong appear
Than other words? Whether we will or no,
Through reason's court doth it unquestion'd go
E'en on the mention, and of course transmit
Notions of something excellent?

The same poem contains a full-length portrait of the poet, with the unscrupulous but lifelike mark of his own strong, unflattering hand. He laughs at himself as an unlick'd' bear; and tells us that Hogarth, even envy must allow,' would draw to the life his awkward foppery, were Hogarth living now.' Hogarth was living now,' but at the moment when the words were written, within view of his death-bed. Churchill little knew how nearly he approached his own; and yet, in the unfinished Journey, the last fragment found among his papers, (for the severe and masterly Dedication to Warburton was of earlier date,) there was a strange unconscious kind of sense of the fate that now impended. The lamentations of his good-natured friends, that but for his unhappy lust of publishing so fast, he might have 'flourish'd twenty years or more, though now, alas! poor man, worn out in four,' were here noticed in some of his most vigor

ous verse.

He proposes to take their advice, but finds the restraint too hard. Prose will run into verse. 'If now and then I curse, my curses chime; nor can I pray, unless I pray in rhyme.' He therefore entreats that they will once more be charitable even to his excesses, and read, no easy task, but probably the last that I shall ask,' that little poem. He calls it the plain unlaboured Journey of a Day; warns off all who resort to him for the stronger stimulants; exhorts the Muses, in some of his happiest satire, to divert themselves with his contemporary poets in his absence; bids them so their appetite for laughter feed; and closes with the line, I on my Journey all alone proceed!' The poem was not meant to close here; but a Greater Hand interposed. That line of mournful significance is the last that was written by Churchill.

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A sudden desire to see Wilkes took him hastily to Boulogne on the 22d of October 1764. 'Dear Jack, adieu! C. C!' was the laconic announcement of his departure to his brother. At Boulogne, on the 29th of October, a miliary fever seized him, and baffled the physicians who were called in. The friends who surrounded his bed gave way to extreme distress it was a moment when probably Wilkes felt: but Churchill preserved his composure. He was described afterwards, checking their agitated grief, in the lines with which he had calmly looked forward to this eventful time:

Let no unworthy sounds of grief be heard,
No loud laments, not one unseemly word;
Let sober triumphs wait upon my bier,

I won't forgive that friend who sheds one tear.
Whether he's ravish'd in life's early morn,
Or in old age drops like an ear of corn,
Full ripe he falls, on nature's noblest plan,
Who lives to reason, and who dies a man.'

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dear

He sat up in his bed and dictated a brief, just will. He left his wife an annuity of £60, and an annuity of £50 to the girl he had seduced. He provided for his two boys. He left mourning rings to Lord and Lady Temple; to Wilkes, Lloyd, Cotes, Walsh, and the Duke of Grafton; and he desired his friend, John Wilkes, to collect and publish his works, with the • remarks and explanations he has prepared, and any others he thinks proper to make.' He then expressed a wish to be removed, that he might die in England; and the imprudent measures of his friends, in compliance with this wish, hastened the crisis. On the 4th of November 1764, at Boulogne, and in the thirty-third year of his age, Charles Churchill breathed his last. Warburton said he had perished of a drunken debauch ;—a

dead; but that a lady at his elbow was dissuading him with the flattery (and how sweet is flattery,' he interposes, from the ⚫ woman we love!') that Hogarth was already killed.

That the offending painter was already killed, Walpole and others beside this nameless lady also affirmed; and Colman boldly avouched in print, that the Epistle had snapped the last 'cord of poor Hogarth's heartstrings.' But men like Hogarth do not snap their heartstrings so easily. The worst that is to be said of the fierce assault, is bad enough. It embittered the last years of a great man's life; and the unlooked-for death of assailant and assailed within nine days of each other, prevented the reconciliation which would surely, sooner or later, have vindicated their common genius, the hearty English feeling which they shared, and their common cordial hatred of the falsehoods and pretences of the world.

The woman whose flattery Churchill loved, may not be omitted from his history. His connexion with her, which began some little time before this, gave him greater emotion and anxiety than any other incident of his life. I for'got to tell you,' writes Walpole to Lord Hertford, and you may wonder at hearing nothing of the Rev. Mr Charles Pylades, while Mr John Orestes is making such a figure; but 'Doctor Pylades, the poet, has forsaken his consort and the muses, and is gone off with a stone-cutter's daughter. If he should come and offer himself to you for chaplain to the 'embassy!' The circumstance has since been told by a sincerer man; and we shall alike avoid the danger of too much leniency and too great a severity, if we give it in his temperate language. 'He became intimate with the daughter of a tradesman in West'minster,' says Southey in the Life of Cowper, (she is described by others as the daughter of a highly respectable sculptor,') 'seduced her, and prevailed on her to quit her father's house and live with him. But his moral sense had not been thoroughly depraved; a fortnight had not elapsed before both parties were struck with sincere compunction, and through the 'intercession of a true friend, at their entreaty, the unhappy 'penitent was received by her father. It is said she would have proved worthy of this parental forgiveness, if an elder sister ' had not, by continued taunts and reproaches, rendered her life 'so miserable, that, in absolute despair, she threw herself upon Churchill for protection.' He again received her, and they lived together till his death; but he did not, to himself or others, attempt to vindicate this passage in his career. A poem called the Conference, in which an imaginary lord and himself are the interlocutors, happened to engage him at the time; and

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