'Ah! well-a-day, how long must I endure For many songs and tales of mirth had I, To rocks and woods pour fourth my fruitless moan. Though not so fair, she would have proved more kind. And flowers, though left ungathered, will decay: My words are wind! She, deaf to all my cries, His Poems were published by Ambrose Philips in 1748, and reappeared in 1765. John Philips (1676–1709), author of The Splendid Shilling, which Addison pronounced 'the finest burlesque poem in the English language,' was the son of the vicar of Brampton in Oxfordshire, who was also Archdeacon of Salop. He studied at Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford; his life, mainly devoted to literature, was cut short by consumption. His early love of Milton is reflected in all his poems. The Splendid Shilling, a mock-heroic poem in Miltonic blank verse, is not in the least designed disrespectfully to burlesque Milton, whom Philips reverenced. He wrote also a Tory celebration of the battle of Blenheim; but his most considerable effort in serious verse was Cyder, an imitation of Virgil's Georgics. The Splendid Shilling is a classic, read and reprinted while the other poems are forgotten. The Splendid Shilling. Happy the man who, void of cares and strife, Thus, while my joyless minutes tedious flow With vocal heel thrice thundering at my gate, Of wood-hole; straight my bristling hairs erect Behind him stalks In durance strict detain him till, in form Of money, Pallas sets the captive free. Beware, ye debtors; when ye walk, beware, So pass my days. But when nocturnal shades In vain; awake, I find the settled thirst The Lilybean shore, with hideous crush The crowding waves gush with impetuous rage, The mariners; death in their eyes appears; They stare, they lave, they pump, they swear, they pray Vain efforts! still the battering waves rush in, Implacable; till, deluged by the foam, The ship sinks foundering in the vast abyss. Juniper's Magpie and the Town-hall were Oxford alehouses Mundungus, for tobacco, is from Span. mondongo, tripe, paunch Cestrian is a Latinised adjective for of Chester' or of Cheshire Arvonia is Carnarvon; Maridunum, Carmarthen; Brechinia Brecknock; Vaga, the Wye; Ariconium is Kenchester (possibly Ross); Massic, Setinian, and Falernian were old wines of Italy beloved of the Romans. Arachne is the spider; John-apple, a apple-john, is a variety best for use when long preserved and shrivelled. Cronian, from Kronos, Saturn, means simply Arctic: Lilybean, from the promontory of Lilybæum at the western end of Sicily, is here used for Sicilian at large. Eustace Budgell (1686-1737) was a cousin of Addison, and from Trinity College, Oxford, entered the Temple. He accompanied Addison to Ireland as clerk, and afterwards rose to be Under-Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant and a member of the Irish Parliament. Thirty-seven numbers of the Spectator are ascribed to Budgell; Dr Johnson reported them to have been so much 'mended' by Addison as to be almost his own. No doubt in style and humour they resemble those of Addison; but it was probable enough that Budgell should have tried his best to imitate Addison. In 1717 Budgell, who was vain and vindictive, quarrelled with the Irish Secretary, and wrote pamphlets on his grievances; the result of which was his dismissal from office and return to England. He lost a fortune in the South Sea Scheme, in a series of law-suits, and in attempts to gain a seat in the English House of Commons, and subsequently figured principally as a pamphleteer writer for the Craftsman and Grub Street hack, being at times 'disordered in his senses.' His declining reputation suffered a mortal blow by a charge of having forged a testament in his own favour. By the will of Dr Matthew Tindal, the deist, it appeared (1733) that a legacy of £2000 had been left to Budgell. The will was set aside and the unhappy author disgraced. To this Pope alludes in the couplet : Let Budgell charge low Grub Street on my quill, In May 1737 this wretched man, involved in debts In this he misrepresented Addison, who made the dying Cato say: Yet methinks a beam of light breaks in On my departing soul. Alas! I fear I've been too hasty. O ye powers that search The Art of Growing Rich. The first and most infallible method towards the attaining of this end is thrift; all men are not equally qualified for getting money, but it is in the power of every one alike to practise this virtue; and I believe there are very few persons who, if they please to reflect on their past lives, will not find, that had they saved all those little sums which they have spent unnecessarily, they might at present have been masters of a competent fortune. Diligence justly claims the next place to thrift; I find both these excellently well recommended to common use in the three following Italian proverbs: 'Never do that by proxy which you can do yourself;' Never defer that until to-morrow which you can do to-day; Never neglect small matters and expenses.' A third instrument in growing rich is method in business, which, as well as the two former, is also attainable by persons of the meanest capacities. The famous De Witt, one of the greatest statesmen of the age in which he lived, being asked by a friend how he was able to despatch that multitude of affairs in which he was engaged, replied, That his whole art consisted in doing one thing at once. If, says he, I have any necessary despatches to make, I think of nothing else until those are finished; if any domestic affairs require my attention, I give myself up wholly to them until they are set in order. In short, we often see men of dull and phlegmatick tempers arriving to great estates, by making a regular and orderly disposition of their business; and that, without it, the greatest parts and most lively imaginations rather puzzle their affairs than bring them to an happy issue. From what has been said, I think I may lay it down as a maxim, that every man of good common sense may, if he pleases, in his particular station of life, most certainly be rich. The reason why we sometimes see that men of the greatest capacities are not so, is either because they despise wealth in comparison of something else, or at least are not content to be getting an estate unless they may do it their own way, and at the same time enjoy all the pleasures and gratifications of life. But besides these ordinary forms of growing rich, it must be allowed that there is room for genius as well in this as in all other circumstances of life. Though the ways of getting money were long since very numerous, and though so many new ones have been found out of late years, there is certainly still remaining so large a field for invention, that a man of an indifferent head might easily sit down and draw up such a plan for the conduct and support of his life as was never yet once thought of. We daily see methods put in practice by hungry and ingenious men, which demonstrate the power of invention in this particular. It is reported of Scaramouche, the first famous Italian comedian, that being in Paris, and in great want, he bethought himself of constantly plying near the door of a noted perfumer in that city, and when any one came out who had been buying snuff, never failed to desire a taste of them: when he had by this means got together a quantity made up of several different sorts, he sold it again at a lower rate to the same perfumer, who, finding out the trick, called it tabac de mille fleurs, or snuff of a thousand flowers. The story further tells us, that by this means he got a very comfortable subsistence, until, making too much haste to grow rich, he one day took such an unreasonable pinch out of the box of a Swiss officer as engaged him in a quarrel, and obliged him to quit this ingenious way of life. Nor can I in this place omit doing justice to a youth of my own country, who, though he is scarce yet twelve years old, has, with great industry and application, attained to the art of beating the Grenadiers' March on his chin. I am credibly informed, that by this means he does not only maintain himself and his mother, but that he is laying up money every day, with a design, if the war continues, to purchase a drum at least, if not a pair of colours. I shall conclude these instances with the device of the famous Rabelais, when he was at a great distance from Paris, and without money to bear his expenses thither. This ingenious author being thus sharp set, got together a convenient quantity of brick-dust, and having disposed of it into several papers, writ upon one, Poyson for Monsieur;' upon a second, 'Poyson for the Dauphin;' and on a third, 'Poyson for the King.' Having made this provision for the royal family of France, he laid his papers so that his landlord, who was an inquisitive man and a good subject, might get a sight of them. The plot succeeded as he desired; the host gave immediate intelligence to the secretary of state. The secretary presently sent down a special messenger, who brought up the traitor to court, and provided him at the king's expense with proper accommodations on the road. As soon as he appeared, he was known to be the celebrated Rabelais; and his powder upon examination being found very innocent, the jest was only laught at; for which a less eminent droll would have been sent to the galleys. Trade and commerce might doubtless be still varied a thousand ways, out of which would arise such branches as have not yet been touched. The famous Doily is still fresh in every one's memory, who raised a fortune by finding out materials for such stuffs as might at once be cheap and genteel. I have heard it affirmed, that, had not he discovered this frugal method of gratifying our pride, we should hardly have been able to carry on the last war. I regard trade not only as highly advantagious to the commonwealth in general, but as the most natural and likely method of making a man's fortune, having observed, since my being a Spectator in the world, greater estates got about 'Change than at Whitehall or St James's. I believe I may also add, that the first acquisitions are generally attended with more satisfaction, and as good a conscience. I must not, however, close this essay without observing, that what has been said is only intended for persons in the common ways of thriving, and is not designed for those men who, from low beginnings, push themselves up to the top of states and the most considerable figures in life. My maxim of saving is not designed for such as these, since nothing is more usual than for thrift to disappoint the ends of ambition; it being almost impossible that the mind should be intent upon trifles while it is, at the same time, forming some great design. (From The Spectator, No. 283.) The story about Rabelais is quite apocryphal, though it was long current; the Scaramouch (scaramuccia, skirmish) was not a person, but a character in the old Italian comedy, who was drubbed by the harlequin; Doily's achievements are noted under Gay, at page 175. The Earl of Halifax (1661-1715) was, under his own name of Charles Montagu, famous as a wit in the days of Charles II., but survived to be the patron of Congreve, Addison, Steele, Rowe, and Tickell. Grandson of the parliamentary Earl of Manchester, he was born at Horton, Northamptonshire, and passed from Westminster to Trinity College, Cambridge. His most notable poetical achievement was his share in the parody on Dryden's Hind and Panther, called The Town and Country Mouse (1687), of which he was jointauthor with Matthew Prior. His career in Parliament as financier and Chancellor of the Exchequer is beyond the scope of these pages, where he is commemorated rather as a patron of literature than as a poet. In 1697 he became Premier, but his arrogance and vanity soon made him unpopular, and on the Tories coming into power in 1699 he was obliged to accept the auditorship of the Exchequer and withdraw from the Commons as Baron Halifax. He strongly supported the union with Scotland and the Hanoverian succession; and on George I.'s arrival became an earl and Prime-Minister. Edward Cave (1691-1754), an enterprising and far-sighted editor, deserves mention here as the original Sylvanus Urban.' He was born at Newton near Rugby, where he received some schooling; and after many vicissitudes he became apprentice to a printer. Obtaining money enough to set up a small printing-office, in 1731 he started the Gentleman's Magazine, for which Samuel Johnson became parliamentary reporter in 1740; and amidst his endless periodicals and other undertakings, Cave published Johnson's Rambler, his Irene, London, and Life of Savage. He died with his hand in Johnson's. Lord Lansdowne (1667-1735), made a peer by Queen Anne, and imprisoned for a year and a half after the Hanoverian succession, was born at Hornby the son of a Yorkshire squire. As George Granville (or Grenville) he wrote many poems to Myra' (or 'Mira;' the Countess of Newburgh), and produced a comedy, a tragedy, an adaptation of the Merchant of Venice, a masque, and an opera-none of any permanent interest. He went into Parliament and public life in 1702. Waller, whom he imitated, commended him; and Pope commemorated ‘Granville the polite' among his pretty numerous patrons. John Oldmixon (1673-1742), one of the heroes of the Dunciad, was of an old Somersetshire family. He began to publish poems at twenty-two, but was better known as a pamphleteer and the author of dull partisan histories of the British Empire in America, and of England (against Clarendon and for Burnet); as also of 'memoirs' of France, Scotland, and Ireland, designed to 'shew up' the plans of the French, the Stewarts, and the 'Papists.' In his Essay on Criticism he attacked Addison, Swift, Pope, and others, and thus and in other ways provoked Pope's antipathy. Thomas Hearne (1678-1735), 'who studied and preserved Antiquities,' was born at White Waltham in Berkshire, studied at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and in 1712 beeame second keeper of the Bodleian Library-a post he had to resign as a Jacobite in 1716, though he continued to live at Oxford till his death. He compiled and edited forty-one works, full of laborious learning but poor in style. Among them were Reliquia Bodleiana, Leland's Itinerary and Collectanea, Curious Discourses upon English Antiquities; and the editions of Camden's Annals, William of Newburgh, Fordun's Scotichronicon, Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, and that of Peter Langtoft. The Bibliotheca Hearniana was published in 1848; the Reliquia Hearnianæ in 1857. His autobiography is to be found in the Lives of Leland, Hearne, and Wood (1772). His Collections were edited for the Oxford Historical Society (vols. i.-iii. by Doble, 1885-89; vols. iv.-v. by Rannie, 1902). Thomas Carte (1686-1754) was born at Clifton-upon- Dunsmore vicarage, near Rugby, and educated at University College, Oxford. After taking orders, he was appointed reader at the Abbey Church, Bath; nevertheless in 1714 he resigned rather than take the oaths to the Hanoverian Government. In 1722 he was suspected of complicity in the conspiracy of Atterbury, whose secretary he was, and Licoo was offered for his apprehension; but he escaped to France, where he remained till 1728. After his return he published a Life of James, Duke of Ormonde (2 vols. 1736), and a History of England to 1654 (4 vols. 1747-55), whose prospects were blighted by an unlucky note ascribing to the Pretender the gift of touching for the king's evil. Subscribers withdrew their names, and the historian was 'left forlorn and abandoned amid his extensive collections.' His style was not attractive, but Carte's laborious history was a real triumph of research, and greatly above the level of any work that had yet appeared in England. Till now the most considerable had been the (partisan Whig) Compleat History, finally issued in 1706 by White Kennett; Echard's (1707); and the clear, methodical, and comparatively impartial English history by Paul Rapin de Thoyras, a French Protestant who had come to England with William III. and had fought at the Boyne and at Limerick. It was at the Hague and at Wesel that Rapin wrote his eight-volume Histoire d'Angleterre (1724), which was soon translated (1726-31) and became the standard work even in England. Against it Carte justly complained that Rapin had no knowledge of documents save those in Rymer's Fadera, and had never looked at the valuable materials in the rolls of Parliament, the Cottonian MSS., and other available sources. Carte really did make an attempt to utilise the documents at his command; and though his work failed, it proved invaluable to many successors. William Stukeley (1687-1765), called the 'Arch-Druid,' was born at Holbeach; studied at Corpus, Cambridge; and practised as a doctor at Boston, London, and Grantham. In 1729 he took orders, and in 1747 became a London rector. His twenty works (1720-26), dealing with Stonehenge, Avebury, and antiquities generally, enshrine much that is credulous as well as curious. His Diary and Correspondence was published by the Surtees Society in 1884-87. Benjamin Hoadly (1676-1761), successively Bishop of Bangor, Hereford, Salisbury, and Winchester, was a prelate of great controversial ability, who threw the weight of his talents into the scale of Whig politics when fiercely attacked by Tories and Jacobites. Born at Westerham in Kent, in 1697 he was elected a Fellow of Catharine Hall, Cambridge. In 1706, while rector of St Peter-lePoor, London, he attacked a sermon by Atterbury, and thus incurred the enmity and ridicule of Swift and Pope. He defended the Revolution of 1688, and attacked the doctrines of divine right and passive obedience with such vigour and perseverance that, in 1709, the House of Commons recommended him to the favour of the queen. Her successor, George I., elevated him in 1715 to the see of Bangor. Shortly after his elevation to the Bench Hoadly published a work against the Nonjurors, and a sermon preached before the king at St James's, on the 'Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ,' from the text, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' The latter excited a long and vehement dispute, known by the name of the Bangorian Controversy, in which an endless series of tracts was published. The Lower House of Convocation censured Hoadly's views, as calculated to subvert the government and discipline of the Church, and to impugn and impeach the royal supremacy in matters ecclesiastical. The controversy was conducted with unbecoming violence, and several bishops and other grave divines-Sherlock among the number-forgot the dignity of their station and the spirit of Christian charity in the heat of party warfare. Pope alludes sarcastically to Hoadly's sermon in the Dunciad: Toland and Tindal, prompt at priests to jeer, Yet silent bowed to Christ's no kingdom here. Yet Hallam held that there was nothing whatever in Hoadly's sermon injurious to the established endowments and privileges, nor to the discipline and government of the English Church, even in theory. If this had been the case, he might have been reproached with some inconsistency in becoming so large a partaker of her honours and emoluments. He even admitted the usefulness of censures for open immoralities, though denying all Church authority to oblige any one to external communion, or to pass any sentence which should determine the condition of men with respect to the favour or displeasure of God. Another great question in this controversy was that of religious liberty as a civil right, which the Convocation explicitly denied. And another related to the much-debated exercise of private judgment in religion, which, as one party meant virtually to take away, so the other perhaps unreasonably exaggerated.' Hoadly was author of several other works, as on the reasonableness of conformity and on the sacrament. The following is from the famous sermon on John xviii. 36: The Kingdom of Christ not of this World. If, therefore, the church of Christ be the kingdom of Christ, it is essential to it that Christ himself be the sole lawgiver and sole judge of his subjects, in all points relating to the favour or displeasure of Almighty God; and that all his subjects, in what station soever they may be, are equally subjects to him; and that no one of them, any more than another, hath authority either to make new laws for Christ's subjects, or to impose a sense upon the old ones, which is the same thing; or to judge, censure, or punish the servants of another master, in matters relating purely to conscience or salvation. If any person hath any other notion, either through a long use of words with inconsistent meanings, or through a negligence of thought, let him but ask himself whether the church of Christ be the kingdom of Christ or not; and if it be, whether this notion of it doth not absolutely exclude all other legislators and judges in matters relating to conscience or the favour of God, or whether it can be his kingdom if any mortal men have such a power of legislation and judgment in it. This inquiry will bring us back to the first, which is the only true account of the church of Christ, or the kingdom of Christ, in the mouth of a Christian; that it is the number of men, whether small or great, whether dispersed or united, who truly and sincerely are subjects to Jesus Christ alone as their lawgiver and judge in matters relating to the favour of God and their eternal salvation. The next principal point is, that, if the church be the kingdom of Christ, and this kingdom be not of this world,' this must appear from the nature and end of the laws of Christ, and of those rewards and punishments which are the sanctions of his laws. Now, his laws are declarations relating to the favour of God in another state after this. They are declarations of those conditions to be performed in this world on our part, without which God will not make us happy in that to come. And they are almost all general appeals to the will of that God; to his nature, known by the common reason of mankind, and to the imitation of that nature, which must be our perfection. The keeping his commandments is declared the way to life, and the doing his will the entrance into the kingdom of heaven. The being subjects to Christ is to this very end, that we may the better and more effectually perform the will of God. The laws of this kingdom, therefore, as Christ left them, have nothing of this world in their view; no tendency either to the exaltation of some in worldly |