papers, retired into the country, and eluded all search. Churchill now set about his satire, the Prophecy of Famine, which, like Wilkes's North Briton, was specially directed against the Scottish nation. The outlawry of Wilkes separated the friends, but they kept up a correspondence, and Churchill continued to be a keen political satirist. The excesses of his daily life remained equally notorious, and he cherished a discreditable alliance with the daughter of a Westminster tradesman. Hogarth, who disapproved of Churchill as a friend of Wilkes, caricatured the satirist as a bear dressed canonically, with ruffles at his paws, and holding a pot of porter. Churchill took revenge in a fierce and sweeping 'epistle' to Hogarth, which is said to have caused him exquisite annoyance. The unhappy satirist's career drew to a sad and premature close. In October 1764 he went to France to pay a visit to his friend Wilkes, and was seized at Boulogne with a fever, of which he died next month; and the ex-clergyman's will, made the day before his death, contains, contrary to the then usual formula, not the slightest expression of religious faith or hope. He was buried at Dover, and some of his gay associates placed over his grave a stone, on which was engraved his own line:

Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.

A worthier tribute was given fifty years afterwards by Byron in his lines on the grave of him who blazed the comet of a season.' Churchill expressed contrition for misconduct in verses that evidently came from the heart :

Look back! a thought which borders on despair,
Which human nature must, yet cannot bear.
'Tis not the babbling of a busy world,
Where praise and censure are at random hurled,
Which can the meanest of my thoughts control,
Or shake one settled purpose of my soul;
Free and at large might their wild curses roam,
If all, if all, alas! were well at home.
No; 'tis the tale which angry conscience tells,
When she with more than tragic horror swells
Each circumstance of guilt; when, stern but true,
She brings bad actions forth into review,
And, like the dread handwriting on the wall,
Bids late remorse awake at reason's call;
Armed at all points, bids scorpion vengeance pass,
And to the mind holds up reflection's glass-
The mind which starting heaves the heartfelt groan,
And hates that form she knows to be her own.

(From The Conference.) In Night, Churchill thus ingeniously descanted on the proverbial privileges of poets:

What is 't to us if taxes rise or fall?
Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all.
Let muckworms, who in dirty acres deal,
Lament those hardships which we cannot feel.
His Grace, who smarts, may bellow if he please,
But must I bellow too, who sit at ease?
By custom safe, the poet's numbers flow
Free as the light and air some years ago.

No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours and excise our brains.
Burdens like these, vile earthly buildings bear;
No tribute's laid on castles in the air!

No English poet, Southey said, ever enjoyed so excessive and so short-lived a popularity as Churchill; indeed no one seems more thoroughly to have understood his own powers; there is no indication in any of his pieces that he could have done anything better than the thing he did. To Wilkes he said that nothing came out till he began to be pleased with it himself; but to the public, as in these lines from Gotham, he boasted of the haste and carelessness with which his verses were poured forth':

Had I the power, I could not have the time,
While spirits flow, and life is in her prime,
Without a sin 'gainst pleasure, to design
A plan, to methodise each thought, each line,
Highly to finish, and make every grace
In itself charming, take new charms from place.
Nothing of books, and little known of men,
When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen;
Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down,
Rough as they run, discharge them on the town.

Churchill lacked the chief essentials of true satire, a real insight into the heart of man and that rarest power of happy exaggeration, of preserving likeness in unlikeness and verisimilitude in distortion. A fatal volubility in rhyming, a kind of boisterous but unequal energy, and an instinctive hatred of wrong, often hardly to be distinguished from the mere spleen and obstinacy, combined to make him the hero of the hour and its ephemeral interests, but was not equipment enough for a Dryden, or even a Butler.

The most amusing and, on the whole, the best of Churchill's satires is his Prophecy of Famine, professedly a Scots pastoral inscribed to Wilkes. The Earl of Bute's administration had directed the enmity of all disappointed patriots and partisans against the Scottish nation. Even Johnson and Junius were not above giving this complexion to their prejudice, and Churchill revelled in it with such undisguised exaggeration that the most saturnine or sensitive of Scotsmen might have laughed at its extravagant absurdity. This unique pastoral opens as follows:

A Scots Pastoral.

Two boys whose birth, beyond all question, springs
From great and glorious though forgotten kings,
Shepherds of Scottish lineage, born and bred
On the same bleak and barren mountain's head,
By niggard nature doomed on the same rocks
To spin out life, and starve themselves and flocks,
Fresh as the morning, which, enrobed in mist,
The mountain's top with usual dullness kissed,
Jockey and Sawney to their labours rose;
Soon clad, I ween, where nature needs no clothes;
Where from their youth inured to winter skies,
Dress and her vain refinements they despise.

Jockey, whose manly high cheek-bones to crown,
With freckles spotted flamed the golden down,
With meikle art could on the bagpipes play,
Even from the rising to the setting day;
Sawney as long without remorse could bawl
Home's madrigals, and ditties from Fingal :
Oft at his strains, all natural though rude,
The Highland lass forgot her want of food,
And, whilst she scratched her lover into rest,

Sunk, pleased though hungry, on her Sawney's breast.
Far as the eye could reach no tree was seen,
Earth, clad in russet, scorned the lively green:
The plague of locusts they secure defy,
For in three hours a grasshopper must die:
No living thing, whate'er its food, feasts there,
But the chameleon, who can feast on air.
No birds, except as birds of passage, flew ;
No bee was known to hum, no dove to coo:
No streams, as amber smooth, as amber clear,
Were seen to glide, or heard to warble here:
Rebellion's spring, which through the country ran,
Furnished with bitter draughts the steady clan :
No flowers embalmed the air, but one white rose,
Which on the tenth of June by instinct blows;
By instinct blows at morn, and, when the shades
Of drizzly eve prevail, by instinct fades.

The tenth of June was the birthday of the old Chevalier. In the same poem Churchill comments on himself:

Me, whom no muse of heavenly birth inspires,
No judgment tempers, when rash genius fires;
Who boast no merit but mere knack of rhyme,
Short gleams of sense and satire out of time;
Who cannot follow where trim fancy leads

By prattling streams, o'er flower-empurpled meads:
Who often, but without success, have prayed
For apt alliteration's artful aid;

Who would, but cannot with a master's skill
Coin fine new epithets which mean no ill :
Me thus uncouth, thus every way unfit
For pacing poesy and ambling wit,

Taste with contempt beholds, nor deigns to place
Amongst the lowest of her favoured race.

Smollett, who, as the satirist believed, had attacked him in the Critical Review, was treated with ironical compliment in The Apology addressed to the Critical Reviewers:

Smollett.

Whence could arise this mighty critic spleen,
The muse a trifler, and her theme so mean?
What had I done that angry heaven should send
The bitterest foe where most I wished a friend?
Oft hath my tongue been wanton at thy name,
And hailed the honours of thy matchless fame.
For me let hoary Fielding bite the ground
So nobler Pickle stand superbly bound;
From Livy's temples tear the historic crown,
Which with more justice blooms upon thine own.
Compared with thee, be all life-writers dumb,
But he who wrote the life of Tommy Thumb.
Who ever read the Regicide but swore
The author wrote as man ne'er wrote before?
Others for plots and under-plots may call,
Here's the right method--have no plot at all!

On Hogarth.

Hogarth-I take thee, Candour, at thy word,
Accept thy proffered terms, and will be heard.
Thee have I heard with virulence declaim,
Nothing retained of Candour but the name;
By thee have I been charged in
angry strains
With that mean falsehood which my soul disdains.
Hogarth! stand forth.-Nay, hang not thus aloof.
Now, Candour, now thou shalt receive such proof,
Such damning proof, that henceforth thou shalt fear
To tax my wrath, and own my conduct clear.
Hogarth! stand forth-I dare thee to be tried
In that great court where Conscience must preside;
At that most solemn bar hold up thy hand;
Think before whom, on what account, you stand,
Speak, but consider well: from first to last
Review thy life, weigh every action past.
Nay, you shall have no reason to complain.
Take longer time, and view them o'er again.
Canst thou remember from thy earliest youth-
And, as thy God must judge thee, speak the truth-

A single instance where, self laid aside,
And justice taking place of fear and pride,
Thou with an equal eye didst genius view,
And give to merit what was merit's due?
Genius and merit are a sure offence,
And thy soul sickens at the name of sense.
Is any one so foolish to succeed?

On Envy's altar he is doomed to bleed.
Hogarth, a guilty pleasure in his eyes,
The place of executioner supplies;
See how he gloats, enjoys the sacred feast,
And proves himself by cruelty a priest.
In walks of humour, in that cast of style,
Which, probing to the quick, yet makes us smile;
In comedy, his natural road to fame,
Nor let me call it by a meaner name,
Where a beginning, middle, and an end

Are aptly joined; where parts on parts depend,
Each made for each, as bodies for their soul
So as to form one true and perfect whole,
Where a plain story to the eye is told,
Which we conceive the moment we behold,
Hogarth unrivalled stands, and shall engage
Unrivalled praise to the most distant age.

In The Farewell Churchill has

Be England what she will; With all her faults, she is my country still; which Cowper's Task improved into the form more familiar (as quoted in Beppo):

England, with all thy faults I love thee still-
My country!

Churchill, unconsciously repeating Spenser, writes of 'a bold, bad man ;' 'He mouths a sentence as a dog a bone' is in the Rosciad; and 'A heart to pity and a hand to bless' is from the Prophecy of Famine; and it is Gotham which describes

Old age, a second child, by nature curst
With more and greater evils than the first;
Weak, sickly, full of pains in ev'ry breath,
Railing at life and yet afraid of death.

See Forster's Essays, Southey's Life of Cowper, and Lowe's edition of the Rosciad (1891).

William Falconer (1732-69) was born in Edinburgh, the son of a poor barber, whose two other children were both of them deaf and dumb. He went early to sea on board a Leith merchantship, and was afterwards servant to a purser in the navy. Before he was eighteen he was second mate in the Britannia, a vessel in the Levant trade, shipwrecked off Cape Colonna, with the loss of all the crew but three; and this Falconer made the subject of his popular poem. In 1751 he was living in Edinburgh, where he published his first poetical attempt, a monody on the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales; wishing, with a zeal worthy of ancient Pistol,

To assist the pouring rains with brimful eyes, And aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs! In 1762 appeared the eminently successful Shipwreck, dedicated to the Duke of York, who procured the sailor-poet's appointment as midshipman on the Royal George, whence he was transferred to be purser in the Glory, a frigate of thirty-two guns. Settling in London at the peace, he wrote a poor satire on Wilkes, Churchill, and others, and compiled a useful nautical dictionary. In October 1769 he sailed from England as purser of the Aurora frigate, bound for India. The vessel reached the Cape of Good Hope early in December, but foundered soon after, as is supposed, in the Mozambique Channel.

Three editions of the Shipwreck were published during the author's life; the second (1764) had about nine hundred new lines added; the third, issued the very day before he embarked on his fatal voyage, had about two hundred additional lines, with various alterations and transpositions, by no means all improvements-some of the best passages were spoilt, and parts of the narrative confused. Hence Mr Stanier Clarke, in a splendid illustrated edition of the poem (1804), restored many of the discarded lines, and presented a text compounded of the three different editions. This version of the poem is that now generally printed; but the Edinburgh edition of 1858 follows more closely Falconer's latest edition. Clarke conjectured and other editors copied his preposterous error-that Falconer, overjoyed at his appointment to the Aurora, and busy preparing for his voyage, had entrusted to his friend David Mallet the revision of the poem, and that Mallet had corrupted the text. Now, Mallet had at this time been dead for four years, and Falconer, in the advertisement prefixed to the work, expressly states that he had himself subjected it to a strict and thorough revision. Unfortunately, as in Akenside's case, his success was not commensurate with his labour.

The Shipwreck has the rare merit of being both true to fact and poetical; even its rules and directions are approved of by seamen. At first the poet did little more than describe in nautical phrase and simple narrative the disaster he had witnessed; the characters of Albert, Rodmond, Palemon, and

Anna were added in the second edition. The scene of the shipwreck helped Falconer to many interesting recollections and suggestions. In al Attica,' says Lord Byron, ‘if we except Athens itself and Marathon, there is no scene more interesting than Cape Colonna. To the antiquary and artist, sixteen columns are an inexhaustible source of observation and design; to the philosopher, the supposed scene of some of Plato's conversations will not be unwelcome; and the traveller will be struck with the beauty of the prospect over "isles that crown the Egean deep." Yet another association for Englishmen Colonra acquired when it brought about Falconer's Ship wreck. Some of Falconer's long descriptive and episodical passages interrupt the narrative, or are feeble and affected; but the characters of his officers are admirably discriminated: Albert, the commander, is brave, liberal, and just, softened by domestic ties and professional acquirements; Rodmond is rude and boisterous, a hardy, weatherbeaten Northumbrian, yet kindly and unselfish ; Palemon, though 'charged with the commerce,' is the lover of the poem, but too effeminate for his rough work.

Evening at Sea.

The sun's bright orb, declining all serene,
Now glanced obliquely o'er the woodland scene.
Creation smiles around; on every spray
The warbling birds exalt their evening lay.
Blithe skipping o'er yon hill, the fleecy train
Join the deep chorus of the lowing plain ;
The golden lime and orange there were seen,
On fragrant branches of perpetual green.
The crystal streams, that velvet meadows lave,
To the green ocean roll with chiding wave.
The glassy ocean hushed forgets to roar,
But trembling murmurs on the sandy shore:
And lo! his surface, lovely to behold!
Glows in the west, a sea of living gold!
While, all above, a thousand liveries gay
The skies with pomp ineffable array.
Arabian sweets perfume the happy plains:
Above, beneath, around enchantment reigns!
While glowing Vesper leads the starry train,
And night slow draws her veil o'er land and main,
Emerging clouds the azure East invade,
And lap the lucid spheres in gradual shade;
While yet the songsters of the vocal grove
With dying numbers tune the soul to love,
With joyful eyes the attentive master sees
The auspicious omens of an eastern breeze.
Round the charged bowl the sailors form a ring;
By turns recount the wondrous tale, or sing;
As love or battle, hardships of the main,
Or genial wine, awake the homely strain :
Then some the watch of night alternate keep,
The rest lie buried in oblivious sleep.

On the Shores of Greece. The natives, while the ship departs their land, Ashore with admiration gazing stand. Majestically slow, before the breeze, She moved triumphant o'er the yielding seas;

Then towered the masts; the canvas swelled on high;
And waving streamers floated in the sky.
Thus the rich vessel moves in trim array,
Like some fair virgin on her bridal-day.

Thus like a swan she cleaves the watery plain,
The pride and wonder of the Ægean main!

The Storm and Wreck off Cape Colonna.
But now Athenian mountains they descry,
And o'er the surge Colonna frowns on high.
Where marble columns, long by time defaced,
Moss-covered on the lofty Cape are placed;
There reared by fair devotion to sustain,
In elder times, Tritonia's sacred fane.

The circling beach in murderous form appears,
Decisive goal of all their hopes and fears;
The seamen now in wild amazement see
The scene of ruin rise beneath their lee;

Swift from their minds elapsed all dangers past,
As dumb with terror they behold the last.
And now, while winged with ruin from on high,
Through the rent cloud the ragged lightnings fly,
A flash quick glancing on the nerves of light,
Struck the pale helmsman with eternal night :
Rodmond, who heard a piteous groan behind,
Touched with compassion, gazed upon the blind;
And while around his sad companions crowd,
He guides the unhappy victim to the shroud :
'Hie thee aloft, my gallant friend,' he cries;
'Thy only succour on the mast relies.'
The helm, bereft of half its vital force,
Now scarce subdued the wild unbridled course;
Quick to the abandoned wheel Arion came,
The ship's tempestuous sallies to reclaim.
The vessel, while the dread event draws nigh,
Seems more impatient o'er the waves to fly :
Fate spurs her on. Thus, issuing from afar,
Advances to the sun some blazing star;
And, as it feels the attraction's kindling force,
Springs onward with accelerated course.
The moment fraught with fate approaches fast!
While thronging sailors climb each quivering mast:
The ship no longer now must stem the land,
And Hard a starboard!' is the last command;
While every suppliant voice to Heaven applies,
The prow, swift wheeling, to the westward flies;
Twelve sailors, on the foremast who depend,
High on the platform of the top ascend :
Fatal retreat for while the plunging prow
Immerges headlong in the wave below,

Down-pressed by watery weight the bowsprit bends,
And from above the stem deep crashing rends.
Beneath her bow the floating ruins lie;
The foremast totters, unsustained on high;

And now the ship, fore-lifted by the sea,
Hurls the tall fabric backward o'er her lee;
While, in the general wreck, the faithful stay
Drags the maintop-mast by the cap away.
Flung from the mast, the seamen strive in vain
Through hostile floods their vessel to regain.
Weak hope, alas! they buffet long the wave,
And grasp at life though sinking in the grave;
Till all exhausted, and bereft of strength,
O'erpowered, they yield to cruel fate at length.
The hostile waters close around their head,
They sink for ever numbered with the dead!

Those who remain the weather shrouds embrace,
Nor longer mourn their lost companions' case.
Transfixed with terror at the approaching doom,
Self-pity in their breasts alone has room :
Albert and Rodmond and Palemon near,
With young Arion on the mast appear;
Even they, amid the unspeakable distress,
In every look distracting thoughts confess;
In every vein the refluent blood congeals,
And every bosom mortal terror feels.
Begirt with all the horrors of the main,
They viewed the adjacent shore, but viewed in vain. . . .
It comes! the dire catastrophe draws near,
Lashed furious on by destiny severe :

The ship hangs hovering on the verge of death,
Hell yawns, rocks rise, and breakers roar beneath!
O yet confirm my heart, ye powers above,
This last tremendous shock of fate to prove!
The tottering frame of reason yet sustain !
Nor let this total havoc whirl my brain!
Since I, all trembling in extreme distress,
Must still the horrible result express.

In vain, alas! the sacred shades of yore
Would arm the mind with philosophic lore:
In vain they'd teach us at the latest breath
To smile serene amid the pangs of death.
Immortal Zeno's self would trembling see
Inexorable fate beneath the lee ;
And Epictetus at the sight in vain
Attempt his stoic firmness to retain ;
Had Socrates, for godlike virtue famed,
And wisest of the sons of men proclaimed,
Spectator of such various horrors been,
E'en he had staggered at this dreadful scene.

In vain the cords and axes were prepared,
For every wave now smites the quivering yard;
High o'er the ship they throw a dreadful shade,
Then on her burst in terrible cascade;
Across the foundered deck o'erwhelming roar,
And foaming, swelling, bound upon the shore.
Swift up the mountain billow now she flies,
Her shattered top half-buried in the skies;
Borne o'er a latent reef the hull impends,
Then thundering on the marble crags descends;
Her ponderous bulk the dire concussion feels,
And o'er upheaving surges wounded reels—
Again she plunges ! hark! a second shock
Bilges the splitting vessel on the rock-
Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke
With strong convulsion rends the solid oak;
Ah Heaven!-behold her crashing ribs divide!
She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruin o'er the tide.

Ossian.

The 'translator' of Ossian still stands in a dim and dubious light, as indeed he seems to have been willing to do in the eyes of his contemporaries; about the primeval Celtic bard himself there is perhaps less matter of debate. Time and taste have abated the pleasure with which the 'poems of Ossian' once were read; but effusions which were in their own time quite unique and engrossed so much attention, which were translated into many different languages, which were hailed with enthusiasm by Gray, David Hume, John Home, and other almost equally eminent persons, and which, in an imperfect Italian translation, formed the favourite reading of Napoleon, demand careful study from students of literature. The Ossianic poems must rank as a monument of the romantic movement in European literature, and seem to have given it a not inconsiderable impulse. They delighted Herder, influenced Goethe and Schiller, and were imitated by Coleridge and Byron, though Wordsworth poured contempt on them. For most men they are associated with the name of James Macpherson, who claimed only to have presented them in an English form.

James Macpherson (1736-96) was born at Ruthven, near Kingussie in Inverness-shire. A small farmer's son, he was brought up a 'barefoot laddie,' but, fully resolved to become a minister, studied at both Aberdeen and Edinburgh in 1753-56. In 1758 he published a heroic poem in six cantos, The Highlander, which at once proved his ambition and his incompetence. For a short time the divinity student taught the school of Ruthven, whence he was glad to remove to become tutor in a wealthy family. While attending his pupil (afterwards Lord Lynedoch) at the spa of Moffat, he became acquainted, in the autumn of 1759, with John Home, the author of Douglas, to whom he showed what he said were translations of fragments of ancient Gaelic poetry still recited in the Highlands. It was, he declared, still one of the favourite amusements of his countrymen to listen to the tales and compositions of their ancient bards, and he described these fragments as full of pathos and poetical power. Under the patronage of Home's friends-Hugh Blair, 'Jupiter' Carlyle, and Adam Ferguson-Macpherson published next year a small volume of sixty pages, entitled Fragments of Ancient Poetry; translated from the Galic or Erse Language. The publication attracted general attention, and a subscription was made to enable Macpherson to make a tour in the Highlands to collect other pieces. His journey proved highly successful. In 1761 he presented the world with Fingal, an epic poem, in six books; in 1763 Temora, another epic, in eight books. The sale was immense, and the fame of the work spread swiftly over the civilised world. The assumption that, in the third or

fourth century, among the wild remote mountains and islands of Scotland, there existed a people exhibiting all the high and chivalrous feelings of refined valour, generosity, magnanimity, and virtue, was eminently calculated to excite astonishment; while the idea of the poems being handed down by oral tradition through so many centuries among rude, savage, and barbarous tribes was little less astounding. Many doubted; others disbelieved; but a still greater number 'indulged the pleasing supposition that Fingal fought and Ossian sang.' It was hinted that Macpherson was not altogether ill-pleased to lie under the imputation of having hoaxed the British public, since he thus acquired the higher credit as a great original poet. At all events he realised £1200 by his enterprise, and in 1764 accompanied Governor Johnston to Pensacola as his secretary; but, quarrelling with his patron, he returned in 1766, and fixed his residence in London, where he became one of the literary supporters of the administration, published some historical works, and was a popular pamphleteer. In 1773 he published a translation of the Iliad in the same style of poetical prose as Ossian, which merely proved a source of ridicule and opprobrium to the translator. But a pamphlet of his in defence of the taxation of America, and another on the Opposition in Parliament in 1779, were much applauded; and he attempted to combat the Letters of Junius, writing under the signatures of 'Musæus,' 'Scævola,' &c. Appointed agent for the Nabob of Arcot in 1779, he next year obtained a seat in Parliament for the borough of Camelford; yet despite his ambition it does not appear that he ever attempted to speak in the House of Commons. In 1789, having realised a handsome fortune, he purchased the property of Raitts, in his native parish, and having changed its name to the more majestic one of Belleville-since 1900 renamed by his successor Balavil he built upon it a splendid Italianate mansion designed by the architect Adam of Adelphi fame. There he hoped to spend old age in ease and dignity, but survived only seven years. His eagerness for posthumous distinction was seen in some of the bequests of his will. He ordained that his body should be interred in Westminster Abbey, and that a sum of £500 should be laid out in erecting a monument to his memory in some conspicuous situation near his home. Both injunctions were duly fulfilled; he was actually buried near Poets' Corner, and a marble obelisk, with a medallion portrait, may be seen gleaming amidst a clump of trees by the roadside near Kingussie.

In order to understand the controversy about Macpherson's merits and demerits, it is necessary to remember that Ossian was the great heroic poet of the Gael; the name is a diminutiveOisean, Oisin, the little os or deer. In Gaelic story Ossian was the son of Fionn MacCumhail,