Without enjoyment, covetous of pelf,
Tiresome to friends, and tiresome to himself,
His faculties impair'd, his temper sour'd,
His memory of recent things devour'd
E'en with the acting, on his shatter'd brain
Though the false registers of youth remain ;
From morn to evening babbling forth vain praise
Of those rare men, who lived in those rare days
When he, the hero of his tale, was young,
Dull repetitions faltering on his tongue;
Praising grey hairs, sure mark of Wisdom's sway,
E'en whilst he curses time which made him grey,
Scoffing at youth, e'en whilst he would afford
All, but his gold, to have his youth restored;
Shall for a moment, from himself set free,

Lean on his crutch, and pipe forth praise to me."

And observe the exquisite beauty of the lines which follow, where the poet touchingly paraphrases what he had doubtless often read out of his Bible to his congregations.' Let the reader mark above all the charming effect of the repetition, which might seem in after days to have lingered in the ear of that great poet who was soon to spring from the ranks of the peasantry of Scotland, and whose genius and independence, if Churchill could have lived to know them, would with him have far outweighed a wilderness of Butes and Wedderburnes.

"Can the fond Mother from herself depart?
Can she forget the darling of her heart,
The little darling whom she bore and bred,
Nursed on her knees, and at her bosom fed?
To whom she seem'd her every thought to give,
And in whose life alone, she seem'd to live?
Yes, from herself the Mother may depart,
She may forget the darling of her heart,
The little darling, whom she bore and bred,
Nursed on her knees, and at her bosom fed,
To whom she seem'd her every thought to give,
And in whose life alone she seem'd to live ;

1 "Can a woman forget her sucking "child, that she should not have the son of her

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"womb? Yea, they may forget, yet "will I not forget thee." Isaiah

xlix. 15.

But I can not forget, whilst life remains,

And pours her current through these swelling veins,
Whilst memory offers up at reason's shrine,

But I can not forget that Gotham's mine."

The close of the year 1763 witnessed one or two notable events, not needful to be other than slightly dwelt upon here, since history has attended to them all. On the motion of Mr. Grenville (whose jealousy of Pitt had broken the Temple phalanx) in the lower House, the North Briton was ordered to the hangman's hands to be burnt; and on the motion of Lord Sandwich in the upper, Wilkes was committed to the hands of the Attorney-general for prosecution, as the alleged writer of a privately printed immoral parody of Pope's Essay on Man. Some whispers of this latter intention had been carried to Churchill before the session opened, during Wilkes's temporary absence at Paris; but, according to the affidavit of one of the printers concerned, the poet scorned the possibility of public harm to his friend from a private libel, which he did not believe him to have written, and of which not a copy that had not been stolen (a man named Kidgell, whom Walpole calls a dirty dog of a parson, was the thief and government-informer) was in circulation. He therefore roughly told the printer who brought him his suspicions, that "for anything the people "in power could do, they might be damned." But he had greatly underrated, if not the power of these people in the ordinary sense, at least their power of face.

Lord Sandwich rose in his place in the House of Lords, the Essay on Woman in his hand, with all the indignant gravity of a counsel for the morality of the entire kingdom. "It was blasphemous!" exclaimed the first Lord of the Admiralty. (And who should know blasphemy better than a blasphemer, for had not the first Lord been expelled the Beef-steak Club for the very sin he charged on Wilkes ? But he knew his audience, and went steadily on.) He read the Essay on Woman till the decorous Lord Lyttelton begged the reading might be stopped: he dwelt upon a

particular note, which, by way of completing the burlesque, bore the name of Pope's last editor, till Warburton rose from the bench of Bishops, begged pardon of the devil for comparing him with Wilkes, and said the blackest fiends in hell would not keep company with the demagogue when he should arrive there. Nothing less than the expulsion of the man from Parliament (he was already expelled from the Colonelcy of the Bucks militia, and Lord Temple from the Bucks lord-lieutenancy for supporting him) could satisfy this case.

Expulsion was a happy expedient for controlling the elective franchise, which the popular Walpole had himself resorted to; but in such wise that the popular franchise seemed all the more safely guaranteed by it. Now the people saw it revived and enforced, for purposes avowedly and grossly unpopular. They were asked, by men whose whole lives had shamelessly proclaimed the prevailing divorce between politics and morals, to sanction the principle that a politician should be made accountable for immorality; and Morality herself, howsoever regretting it, might hardly blame them for the answer they gave. They resisted. They stood by Wilkes more determinedly than ever, and excitement was raised to a frightful pitch. A friend of Sandwich's, who, the day after his motion against the Essay, cried out exultingly that "nobody but he could "have struck a stroke like this," was obliged to confess, only eight days later, that the " blasphemous book had "fallen ten times heavier on Sandwich's head than on "Wilkes's, and had brought forward such a catalogue of "anecdotes as was incredible." Nay, so great was the height things went to, that even Norton's impudence forsook him; and Warburton, who had expunged Pitt's name for Sandwich's in the dedication to his forthcoming Sermons, thought it best to reinstate Pitt very suddenly.

Nevertheless, the result of the ministerial prosecu tion drove Wilkes to France. There was a design that Churchill, after publication of the poem which arose out of these transactions, and which Horace Walpole thought

"the finest and bitterest of his works" (the Duellist), should have followed his friend; inquiries being meanwhile set on foot as to whether the French government would protect them in efforts to assail their own. The answer was favourable, but the scheme was not pursued. On excellent grounds it has been surmised that Churchill's English feeling revolted at it; and he was essential to its success. For his reputation even now, limited as his themes had been, was not limited to England. "I don't "know," wrote Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, in one of his lately published letters, "whether this man's fame "has extended to Florence; but you may judge of the "noise he makes in this part of the world by the following trait, which is a pretty instance of that good-breeding "on which the French pique themselves. My sister and "Mr. Churchill are in France. A Frenchman asked him "if he was Churchill le fameux poète ?-Non.-Ma foi, Monsieur, tant pis pour vous!" To think that it should be so much the worse for the son of a General, and the husband of a Lady Maria, daughter to an Earl, not to be a low-bred scribbler! Nevertheless, to this day, the world takes note of only one Charles Churchill. Whether so much the worse, or so much the better, for the other, it is not for us to decide.

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The poet, then, stayed in England; and worked at his self-allotted tasks with greater determination than ever. Satire has the repute of bringing forth the energies of those who, on other occasions, have displayed but few and feeble; and many a man from whom nothing vigorous was looked for, has lost his cramps and stiffnesses among the bubbles of these hot springs. We need not wonder, therefore, that Churchill, though with his Beef-steak and other clubs to attend to, his North Briton to manage, and, not seldom, sharp strokes of illness to struggle with, should never have sent forth so many or such masterly works as in the last nine months of his rapid and brilliant career.

He was also able to do so much because he was thorough master of what he had to do. He understood

his own powers too completely to lay any false strain upon them. The ease with which he composed is often mentioned by him, though with a difference. To his Friend he said that nothing came out till he began to be pleased with it himself, while to the Public he boasted of the haste and carelessness with which he set down and discharged his rapid thoughts. Something between the two would probably come nearest the truth. No writer is at all times free from what Ben Jonson calls, "pinch"ing throes ;" and Churchill frequently confesses them. It may have been, indeed, out of a bitter sense of their intensity that he used the energetic phrase, afterwards remembered by his publisher, that "blotting was like

cutting away one's own flesh." But though this and other marks of the genus irritabile undoubtedly declared themselves in him, 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."

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Such as it was-and it can afford that passing touch. of blight-the 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

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