The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 11, September, 1858

Tate had been known as a hanger-on at the court of Charles, and as a feeble versifier and pamphleteer of the Tory school, before an alliance with Dryden gave him a certain degree of importance. The first part of "Absalom and Achitophel," in 1681, convulsed the town and angered the city. Men talked for a time of nothing else. Tate, who was in the secret of its authorship, talked of it to Dryden, and urged an extension of the poem. Were there not enough of Shaftesbury's brisk boys running at large who deserved to be gibbeted? Were there not enough Hebrew names in the two books of Samuel to name each as appropriately as those already nomenclatured? But Dryden was indisposed to undertake a continuation which must fall short of what had been executed in the exact proportion that the characters left for it were of minor consequence. He recommended the task to Tate. Tate, flattered and nothing loath, accordingly sent to the press the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel," embodying a contribution from Dryden of two hundred lines, which are as plainly distinguishable from the rest as a patch of cloth of gold upon cloth of frieze. The credit of this first alliance proved so grateful to Nahum, that he never after ventured upon literary enterprise without the aid of a similar coalition. His genius was inherently parasitic. In conjunction with Tory and Jesuit, he coalesced in the celebration of Castlemaine's gaudy reception at Rome.

In conjunction with Nicholas Brady, he prepared that version of the Psalms still appended to the English Book of Common Prayer. In conjunction with Dryden and others, he translated Juvenal. In conjunction with Lord Dorset, he edited a praiseworthy edition of the poems of Sir John Davies, which might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. In conjunction with Garth, he translated the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid. And in conjunction with Dr. Blow, he prepared those Pindaric flights which set King William asleep, and made Godolphin ashamed that the deeds of Marlborough should be so unworthily sung.

So long as he continued to enjoy the patronage of his liberal Maecenas, Tate, with his aid, and these labors, and the income of his office, contrived to maintain the state of a gentleman. But Dorset died in 1706; the Laureate's dull heroics found no vent; and ere the death of Queen Anne,—an event which he bewailed in the least contemptible of his odes,—his revenues were contracted to the official stipend. The accession of the house of Hanover, in 1714, was the downfall of Toryism; and Tate was a Tory. His ruin was complete. The Elector spared not the house of Pindar. The Laureate was stripped of the wreath; his only income confiscated; and after struggling feebly with fate in the form of implacable creditors, he took refuge in the Old Mint, the resort of thieves and debtors, where in 1715 he died,—it is said, of starvation. Alas, that the common lot of Grub Street should have precedent in the person of laurelled royalty itself!

The coronation of Laureate Rowe was simultaneous with that of George I. His immediate claim to the honor dated back to the year 1702, when his play of "Tamerlane" had caught the popular fancy, and proved of vast service to the ministry at a critical moment in stimulating the national antipathy to France. The effect was certainly not due to artistic nicety or refinement. King William, as Tamerlane, was invested with all virtues conceivable of a Tartar conqueror, united with the graces of a primitive saint; while King Louis, as Bajazet, fell little short of the perfections of Satan. These coarse daubs, executed in the broadest style of the sign-post school of Art, so gratified the mob, that for half a century their exhibition was called for on the night of November the fifth. Rowe, moreover, belonged to the straitest sect of Whiggery,—was so bigoted, indeed, as to decline the acquaintance of a Tory, and in play and prologue missed no chance of testifying devotion to liberal opinions.6 His investiture with the laurel was only another proof that at moments of revolution extremists first rise to the surface. A man of affluent fortune, and the recipient of redundant favors from the new ministry, Rowe enjoyed the sunshine of life, while the dethroned Nahum starved in the Mint, as the dethroned James starved at Rome. Had the dramatic tribute still been exacted, there is little doubt that the author of the "Fair Penitent," and of "Jane Shore," would have lent splendid lustre to his office. His odes, however,—such, at least, as have been thought worthy of preservation among his works,—are a prodigious improvement upon the tenuity of his predecessor, and immeasurably superior in poetical fire and elegance to those of any successor antecedent to Warton.

For, following Nicholas Rowe, there were dark ages of Laureate dulness,—a period redeemed by nothing, unless by the ridicule and controversy to which the wearers of the leaf gave occasion. Rowe died in the last days of 1718. The contest for the vacant place is presumed to have been unusually active. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, imitating Suckling's "Session of the Poets," brings all the versifiers of the time into the canvas, and after humorously dispatching one after another, not sparing himself, closes,—

  "At last, in rushed Eusden, and cried, 'Who shall have it,  But I, the true Laureate, to whom the King gave it?'  Apollo begged pardon, and granted his claim,  But vowed, though, till then, he ne'er heard of his name."7

This Laurence Eusden was a scribbling parson, whose model in Art was Sir Richard Blackmore, and whose morality was of the Puritanical stripe. He had assisted Garth in his Ovid, assuming, doubtless upon high moral grounds, the rendering of the impurest fables. He had written odes to great people upon occasions more or less great, therein exhibiting some ingenuity in varying the ordinary staple of adulation. He had addressed an epithalamium to the Duke of Newcastle upon his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin,—a tribute so gratifying to his Grace, then Lord Chamberlain, as to secure the poet the place of Rowe. Eusden's was doubtless the least honorable name as yet associated with the laurel. His contemporaries allude to him with uniform disdain. Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, tells us,—

  "Eusden, a laurelled bard, by fortune raised,  By very few was read, by fewer praised,"

Pope, as cavalierly, in the "Dunciad":—

  "She saw old Prynne in restless Daniel shine,  And Eusden eke out Blackmore's endless line."

Jacobs, in his "Lives of the Poets," speaks of him as a multifarious writer of unreadable trash,—and names but few of his productions. The truth was, Eusden, secluding himself at his rectory among the fens of Lincolnshire, took no part in society, declined all association with the polite circles of the metropolis, thus inviting attacks, from which his talents were not respectable enough to screen him. That the loftiest revelations of poetry were not required of the Laureate of George I., who understood little or no English, there can be no question. George II. was equally insensible to the Muses; and had the annual lyrics been a mosaic of the merest gibberish, they would have satisfied his earlier tastes as thoroughly as the odes of Collins or Gray. A court, at which Pope and Swift, Young and Thomson were strangers, had precisely that share of Augustan splendor which enabled such as Eusden to shine lustrously.8

And so Eusden shone and wrote, and in the fulness of time—September, 1730—died and was buried; and his laurel others desired.9 The leading claimants were Richard Savage and Colley Cibber. The touching story of Savage had won the heart of the Queen, and she had extracted from the King the promise of the Laureateship for its hero. But in the Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, Savage had an irreconcilable opponent. The apprehension of exciting powerful enmities, if he elevated the "Bastard" and his wrongs to so conspicuous a place, had, no doubt, an influence with the shrewd statesman. Possibly, too, so keen and practical a mind could not but entertain thorough contempt for the man, who, with brains, thews, and sinews of his own, a fair education, and as many golden opportunities of advancement as a reasonable being could desire, should waste his days in profitless mendicancy at the doors of great people, in whining endeavors to excite the sympathies of the indifferent, in poem and petition, in beastly drunkenness, or, if sober, in maudlin lamentations at the bitterness of his fortune. A Falconbridge would have better suited the ministerial taste. At all events, when his Majesty came to request the appointment of the Queen's protégé, he found that the patent had already been made out in the name of Cibber: and Cibber had to be Laureate. The disappointed one raved, got drunk, sober again, and finally wrote an ode to her Majesty, announcing himself as her "Volunteer Laureate," who should repeat his congratulations upon each recurrence of her birthday. The Queen, in pity, sent him fifty pounds, with a promise of an equal amount for each of his annual verses. And although Cibber protested, and ridiculed the new title, as no more sensible than "Volunteer Duke, Marquis, or Prime Minister," still Savage adhered to it and the pension tenaciously, sharing the Queen's favor with Stephen Duck, the marvellous "Thresher,"10 whose effusions were still more to her taste. That the yearly fifty pounds were expended in inexcusable riot, almost as soon as received, was a matter of course. Upon the demise of Queen Caroline, in 1738, Savage experienced another proof of Walpole's dislike. The pensions found upon her Majesty's private list were all continued out of the exchequer, one excepted. The pension of Savage was the exception. Right feelingly, therefore, might he mourn his royal mistress, and vituperate the insensible minister; and that he did both with some degree of animation, the few who still read his poems will freely admit.

Colley Cibber had recommended himself to promotion by consistent partisanship, and by two plays of fair merit and exceeding popularity. "The Careless Husband" even Pope had praised; "The Nonjuror," an adaptation of Molière's "Tartuffe," was one of the most successful comedies of the period. The King had been delighted with it,—a circumstance doubtless considered by Sir Robert in selecting a rival for Savage. Cibber had likewise been the manager, time out of mind, of Drury-Lane Theatre; and if now and then he had failed to recognize the exact direction of popular taste,—as in the instance of the "Beggar's Opera," which he rejected, and which, being accepted by Manager Rich of Covent Garden, made Rich gay and Gay rich,—he was generally a sound stage-tactician and judicious caterer. His career, however, had not been so profitable that an additional hundred pounds should be a thing of indifference; in fact, the sum seemed to be just what was needed to enable him to forsake active duty on the stage,—for the patent was no sooner signed than the veteran retired upon his laurels.

The annals of the Laureateship, during Cibber's reign, are without incident.11 The duties remained unchanged, and were performed, there is no reason to doubt, to the contentment of the King and court.12 But the Laureate himself was peculiarly the object of sarcastic satire. The standing causes were of course in operation: the envy of rival poetasters, the dislike of political opponents, the enmities originating in professional disputes and jealousies. Cibber's manners had not been studied in the school of Chesterfield, although that school was then open and flourishing. He was rude, presumptuous, dogmatic. To superiors in rank he was grudgingly respectful; to equals and inferiors, insupportably insolent. But when to these aggravating traits he added the vanity of printing an autobiography, exposing a thousand assailable points in his life and character, the temptation was irresistible, and the whole population of Grub Street enlisted in a crusade against him.13 Fortunately, beneath the crust of insolence and vanity, there was a substratum of genuine power in the Laureate's make, which rendered him not only a match for these, but for even a greater than these, the author of the "Dunciad." Pope's antipathy for the truculent actor dated some distance back.

  Back to the 'Devil,' the last echoes roll,  And 'Coll!' each butcher roars at Hockley-hole.

The latter accounts for it by telling, that at the first representation of Gay's "Three Hours after Marriage," in 1717, where one of the scenes was violently hissed, some angry words passed between the irritated manager and Pope, who was behind the scenes, and was erroneously supposed to have aided in the authorship. The odds of a scolding match must have been all in favor of the blustering Cibber, rather than of the nervous and timid Pope; but then the latter had a faculty of hate, which his antagonist had not, and he exercised it vigorously. The allusions to Cibber in his later poems are frequent. Thus, in the "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot":—

  "And has not Colley still his Lord and whore?  His butchers Henley? his freemasons Moore?"

And again:—

  "So humble he has knocked at Tibbald's door,  Has drunk with Colley, nay, has rhymed for Moore."

And in the "Imitation of Horace," addressed to Lord Fortescue:—

  "Better be Cibber, I maintain it still,  Than ridicule all taste, blaspheme, quadrille."

"The Dunciad," as originally published in 1728, had Lewis Theobald for its hero. There was neither sense nor justice in the selection. Pope hated Theobald for presuming to edit the plays of Shakspeare with greatly more ability and acuteness than himself had brought to the task. His dislike had no better foundation. Neither the works, the character, nor the associations of the man authorized his elevation to the throne of dulness. The disproportion between the subject and the satire instantly impresses the reader. After the first explosion of his malice, it impressed Pope; and anxious to redeem his error, he sought diligently for some plan of dethroning Tibbald, and raising another to the vacant seat. Cibber, in the mean time, was elevated to the laurel, and that by statesmen whom it was the fate of Pope to detest in secret, and yet not dare to attack in print. The Fourth Book of the "Dunciad" appeared in 1742, and its attacks were mainly levelled at the Laureate. The Laureate replied in a pamphlet, deprecating the poet's injustice, and declaring his unconsciousness of any provocation for these reiterated assaults. At the same time he announced his determination to carry on the war in prose as long as the satirist should wage it in verse,—pamphlet for poem, world without end. Hostilities were now fairly established. Pope issued a fresh edition of his satire complete. The change he had long coveted he now made. The name of Cibber was substituted throughout for that of Theobald, the portraiture remaining the same. Johnson properly ridicules the absurdity of leaving the heavy traits of Theobald on the canvas, and simply affixing the name of his mercurial contemporary beneath; and, indeed, there is much reason to doubt whether the mean jealousy which inspired the first "Dunciad," or the blundering rage which disfigured the second, is in the worse taste. Cibber kept his engagement, replying in pamphlet. The immediate victory was unquestionably his. Morbidly sensitive to ridicule, Pope suffered acutely. Richardson, who found him once with the Cibberine leaves in his hand, declared his persuasion, from the spectacle of rage, vexation, and mortification he witnessed, that the poet's death resulted from the strokes of the Laureate. If so, we must concede him to have been the victor who laid his adversary at his feet on the field. Posterity, however, which listens only to the satirist, has judged differently and unjustly.14 Theobald, though of no original talent, was certainly, in his generation, the most successful illustrator of Shakspeare, and the first, though Rowe and Pope had preceded him in the effort, who had brought a sound verbal criticism to bear on the text. It is to his credit, that many of the most ingenious emendations suggested in Mr. Collier's famous folio were anticipated by this "king of the dunces"; and it must be owned, that his edition is as far superior to Warburton's and Hanmer's, which were not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his. Yet, prompted by the "Dunciad," it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric. Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of the time.

As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire, common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him,—a desire to nominate a successor. In his case, indeed, the idea may have been borrowed from "MacFlecknoe" or the "Dunciad." The Earl of Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin. It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney. He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of "Poems upon Several Occasions";15 his tragedy, "The Earl of Essex," in the composition of which his patron is said to have shared, was universally applauded. Its introduction to the stage was the work of Cibber; and Cibber, assisted by Chesterfield, labored zealously to secure the author a reversion of the laurel upon his own lamented demise.

The effort was unsuccessful. Cibber's death occurred in December, 1757. The administration of the elder Pitt, which had been restored six months before, was insensible to the merits of the prodigious bricklayer. The wreath was tendered to Thomas Gray. It would, no doubt, have proved a grateful relief to royalty, obliged for twenty-seven years to listen twice yearly, if not oftener, to the monotonous felicitations of Colley, to hear in his stead the author of the "Bard," of the "Progress of Poetry," of the "Ode at Eton College." But the relief was denied it. Gray, ambitious only of the historical chair at Cambridge, declined the laurel. In the mean time, the claims of William Whitehead were earnestly advocated with the Lord Chamberlain, by Lord and Lady Jersey, and by the Earl Harcourt. A large vote in the House of Commons might be affected by a refusal. Pitt, who cared nothing for the laurel, but much for the votes, gave his assent, and Whitehead was appointed. Whitehead was the son of a baker, and, as an eleëmosynary scholar at Winchester School, had won a poetical prize offered to the students by Alexander Pope. Obtaining a free scholarship at Cambridge, he became in due time a fellow of Clare Hall, and subsequently tutor to the sons of Lord Jersey and Lord Harcourt, with whom he made the tour of the Continent. Two of his tragedies, "The Roman Father," and "Creüsa," met with more success than they deserved. A volume of poems, not without merit, was given to the press in 1756, and met with unusual favor through the exertions of his two noble friends. That he was not a personal applicant for the laurel, nor conscious of the movement in his behalf, he takes occasion in one of his poems to state:—

"Howe'er unworthily I wear the crown, unasked it came, and from a hand unknown."16

From the warm championship of his friends, and the commendations of Mason, the friend of Gray, we infer that Whitehead was not destitute of fine social qualities. His verse, which is of the only type current a century ago, is elegantly smooth, and wearisomely tame,—nowhere rising into striking or original beauties. Among his merits as a poet modesty was not. His "Charge to the Poets," published in 1762, drew upon him the wrath and ridicule of his fellow-verse-wrights, and perhaps deservedly. Assuming, with amusing vanity, what, if ever true, was only so a century before or a half-century after, that the laurel was the emblem of supremacy in the realm of letters, and that it had been granted him as a token of his matchless merit,—

  "Since my king and patron have thought fit  To place me on the throne of modern wit,—"

he proceeds to read the subject throng a saucy lecture on their vices and follies,—

"As bishops to their clergy give their charge."

A good-natured dogmatism is the tone of the whole; but presumption and dogmatism find no charity among the genus irritabile, and Whitehead received no quarter. Small wits and great levelled their strokes at a hide which self-conceit had happily rendered proof. The sturdiest assailant was Charles Churchill. He never spares him,—

    "Who in the Laureate chair—  By grace, not merit, planted there—  In awkward pomp is seen to sit,  And by his patent proves his wit;  For favors of the great, we know,  Can wit as well as rank bestow;  And they who, without one pretension,  Can get for fools a place or pension,  Must able be supposed, of course,  If reason is allowed due force,  To give such qualities and grace  As may equip them for the place.    "But he who measures as he goes  A mongrel kind of tinkling prose,  And is too frugal to dispense  At once both poetry and sense,—  Who, from amidst his slumbering guards,  Deals out a charge to subject bards,  Where couplets after couplets creep,  Propitious to the reign of sleep," etc.

Again, in the "Prophecy of Famine,"—

  "A form, by silken smile, and tone  Dull and unvaried, for the Laureate known,  Folly's chief friend, Decorum's eldest son,  In every party found, and yet of none,  This airy substance, this substantial shade."

And elsewhere he begs for

        "Some such draught…  As makes a Whitehead's ode go down,  Or slakes the feverette of Brown."

But satire disturbed not the calm equanimity of the pensioner and placeman.

         "The laurel worn  By poets in old time, but destined now  In grief to wither on a Whitehead's brow,"

continued to fade there, until a whole generation of poets had passed away. It was not until the middle of April, 1785, that Death made way for a successor.

The suddenness of Whitehead's decease came near leaving a royal birthday unsung,—an omission scarcely pardonable with one of George the Third's methodical habits. An impromptu appointment had to be made. It was made before the Laureate was buried. Thomas Warton, the Professor of Poetry at Oxford, received the patent on the 30th of April, and his ode, married to fitting music, was duly forthcoming on the 24th of May. The selection of Warton was faultless. His lyrical verse was the best of a vicious school; his sonnets, according to that exquisite sonneteer, Sir Egerton Brydges, were the finest in the language; his "History of English Poetry," of which three volumes had appeared, displayed an intimate acquaintance with the early English writers. Nor should we pass unnoticed his criticisms and annotations upon Milton and Spenser, manifesting as they did the acutest sensitiveness to the finest beauties of poetry. If the laurel implied the premiership of living poets, Warton certainly deserved it. He was a head and shoulders taller than his actual contemporaries.17 He stood in the gap between the old school and the new, between the dead and the coming. Goldsmith and Johnson were no more; Cowper did not print his "Task" until the autumn of 1785; Burns made his début about the same moment; Rogers published his "Ode to Superstition" the next year; the famous "Fourteen Sonnets" of Bowles came two years later; while Wordsworth and Landor made their first appearance in 1793. Fortunate thus in time, Warton was equally fortunate in politics. He was an Oxford Tory, a firm believer in divine right and passive obedience, and a warm supporter of the new ministers. To the King, it may be added, no nomination could have given greater satisfaction. The official odes of Warton evince all the elegant traits which characterize his other writings. Their refined taste and exquisite modulation are admirable; while the matter is far less sycophantic than was to be expected from so devout a monarchist. The tender of the laurel certainly gratified him:—

  "Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure  Nor useless all my vacant days have flowed,  From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature,  Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestowed."18

And, like Southey, he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of "Peter Pindar," he escaped scathless,—gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ordinary proportion of poetical panegyric.