consequences.

Junius never for a moment loses sight of the immediate issue, and he flies swift and direct as an arrow to its heart. The rapid march of the eighteenth century is apparent in his style, and it is admirably suited for a class of literature which, if it impresses at all, must impress at a glance. He possessed the easy air of good society, and his letters, if not those of a great statesman, are at least unquestionably those of a man who had a real and experimental knowledge of public business, who had mixed with active politicians, who knew the anecdotes which circulated in

political society. . . . A reader who knows Junius as we know him now, must indeed have an extraordinary estimate of the value of a brilliant style if he can regard him with the smallest respect. He wisely attacked for the most part men whose rank and position prevented them from descending into the arena, and who were at the same time intensely and often deservedly unpopular. His encounter with Horne was the one instance in which he met a really able and practised writer; and although the character of Horne was a very vulnerable one, he appears to me to have had in this controversy a great advantage over his opponent.-LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, 1882, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. III, ch. xi, pp. 253, 257, 264.

The "Letters of Junius," with which he is credited, are perhaps more famous than excellent, but still excellent. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1886, Specimens of English Prose Style, p. 242.

If Junius could have exercised a greater command of his feelings, he might have provided a still better feast of malignity.

This he could have done by well-contrived admissions, palliations and excuses; and by keeping within the ordinary limits of human nature in his attributing of vices. In that case, we might have had no compunctions in going along with him; our pleasure of malignity would have been unalloyed.--BAIN, ALEXANDER, 1888, English Composition and Rhetoric, Part Second, p. 251.

The literary value of Junius seems to have been absurdly overrated. The letters are vigorous, of course, but their malignity is atoned for or relieved by no philosophical enthusiasm, while the indignation itself appears to be personal first and patriotic afterwards. It is an instance of the difficulty which attends contemporary criticism that Johnson, so eminent a judge of language, thought that Junius was Burke. To us it seems amazing that brass should thus be mistaken for gold. At the same time the Letters have "polish," a quality for which Francis preserved an exaggerated affection; the balance and modulation of their merciless sentences may still please the ear.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1888, A History of Eighteenth Century Literature, p. 363.

They are the work of a man who was a practical politician first and a man of letters afterwards, and his writings are distinguished by a political sagacity and precision of criticism which only a close acquaintance with the practice of politics can give. His motives indeed were not of a high order; personal spite entered largely into them, and many of his letters were written merely to revenge real or fancied wrongs.-POLLARD, A. F., 1897, ed., Political Pamphlets, Introduction, p. 22.

M.

I referred to his own writings. He said he recollected them with no pleasure. "Satire is a bad trade."-ROBINSON, HENRY CRABB, 1811, Diary, May 9, pp. 210, 211.

He always sat in a room facing the south. Behind the door stood a square piano-forte, on which there generally lay his favourite Cremona violin; on the left, a mahogany table with writing materials. Everything was in perfect order. Facing him, over the mantlepiece, hung a fine landscape by Richard Wilson.

He was as little fitted for a doctor of medicine as for a doctor of divinity. He could better epigrammatize than prescribe, preferred ridiculing to healing, and had a keener eye for mental or personal obliquities than for corporal infirmities. Wolcot's vanity is irrepressible. Peter is always the prominent picture. He writes to everybody about himself, and he is the central orb round which kings and subjects, and indeed the whole creation, move. His pension, his prophecy, his paintings, his praise, his censure, and his criticisms are to annihilate all other topics. The desire to silence such a critic was quite natural. Nobody likes to be laughed at, and it is not all laughter, for he sometimes uses a whip of scorpions, and lashes sore places with the delight of a Mephistopheles. That in those libel-hunting days he should have escaped unscathed can only be attributed to the fear of giving wider circulation to his incisive jokes, many of which remain indelibly associated with the blunderings and stutterings of the "Good King George."-BOWRING, SIR JOHN, 1872, Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 360,363.

Wolcot was buried in the Church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, at his own request that he might "lie as near as possible to the bones of old Hudibras Butler." His grave is believed to be under the floor of the vestry-room; but there is no tablet to his memory.-HUTTON, LAURENCE, 1885, Literary Landmarks of London, p. 321.

In appearance Wolcot was "a thick squat

man with a large dark and flat face, and no speculation in his eye." He possessed considerable accomplishments, being a fair artist and good musician, and, despite the character of his compositions, his friends described him as of a "kind and hearty disposition." disposition." He was probably influenced in his writings by no real animosity towards royalty, and himself confessed that "the king had been a good subject to him, and he a bad one to the king. CARR, WILLIAM, 1900, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LXII, p. 292.

GENERAL

There is an obscure person, stiling himself Peter Pindar, of whom I shall say a few words. This man certainly possesses a mind by no means uninformed, and a species of humour; but it is exhausted by a repetition of the same manner, and nearly the same ideas, even to disgust. He has the power of rhyming ludicrously, and is sometimes even gifted with poetry; and finally, he is puffed up with a vanity and self-conceited importance, almost without a parallel. This obscure man has contrived, by these qualifications, to thrust himself upon the publick notice, and become the scorn of every man of character and of virtue. Such is the blasphemy, such is the impiety, the obscenity, the impudence and the contempt of all decent respect, which pervade his numerous pamphlets in verse, that the reader is ill repaid by the lively sallies of humour which frequently animate this mass of crudities. I form my judgment from his works, and not from any acquaintance whatever with the man.

Posterity

(if it can be supposed that such trash should exist) will be astonished, that the present age could look with patience on such malignant ribaldry.-MATHIAS, THOMAS JAMES, 1794-96, The Pursuits of Literature, pp. 51, 52.

I cannot tell you how much I admire and despise Peter; he is every way original, and most original in this respect, that I know not that ever any other object at once excited my contempt and admiration. His humour is most peculiar, most unaffected, most irresistible. Yet, for what end Providence intrusted a weapon so dangerous in the hands of one who avows his disregard of everything sacred and venerable, is very difficult for us to conjecture. I am the more fully convinced

of the bad tendency of his writings, from the amusement I derive from them, forearmed as I am by a disgust at his want of principle and decency. "Bozzy and Piozzi," however, is above praise and beyond censure: there the satire is so just, so pointed, so characteristic, that one can laugh without self-reproach. The "Lousiad," however, I regard with a mixture of contempt and disgust.-GRANT, ANNE, 1802, To Miss Dunbar, May 4; Letters from the Mountains, ed. Grant, vol. II.

The most unsparing calumniator of his time. SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1827, Diary, Jan. 17, Memoirs, ed. Lockhart, ch. lxxiii.

There are a few fables of Peter Pindar in the exact style of La Fontaine, and I think them among the best in the language. -ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY, 1829, Memoirs, vol. 8, p. 133.

Wolcot had an eye for little that was grave in life, except the face-makings of absurdity and pretension; but these he could mimic admirably, putting on at one and the same time their most nonchalant and matter-of-course airs, while he fetched out into his countenance the secret nonsense. He echoes their words, with some little comment of approval, or change in their position; some classical inversion, or exaltation, which exposes the pretension in the very act of admitting it, and has an irresistibly ludicrous effect.—HUNT, LEIGH, 1846, Wit and Humour, p. 351.

Dr. Wolcot was certainly one of the most original poets England has produced; his production displaying not merely wit and smartness, but a profound knowledge of the world and of the human heart, combined with a sound and cultivated understanding. His serious poems evince the same command of language and originality of ideas as are displayed in his satires, though he excelled in the latter. CLEVELAND, CHARLES D., 1853, English Literature of the Nineteenth Century, p.111.

I am not sure that I do not prefer Wolcot (Peter Pindar) to Churchill.-ROGERS, SAMUEL, 1855, Recollections of Table-Talk.

The most voluminous, and one of the best, of the humourous poets who have written in the English language.-PARTON, JAMES, 1856, ed., The Humorous Poetry of the English Language, p. 687.

Wolcot was equal to Churchill as a satirist, as ready and versatile in his powers, and possessed of a quick sense of

the ludicrous, as well as a rich vein of fancy and humour. Some of his songs and serious effusions are tender and pleasing; but he could not write long without sliding into the ludicrous and burlesque. His critical acuteness is evinced in his "Odes to the Royal Academicians," in various passages scattered throughout his works; while his ease and felicity, both of expression and illustration, are remarkable.CHAMBERS, ROBERT, 1876, Cyclopædia of English Literature, ed. Carruthers.

At this distance the fun and sport and spontaneous overflowing laughter of the satirist, and the perfect and laughable distinctness of the figure he sets before us, are far more conspicuous than any political mischief that could have been in them. The story of the Dumpling, over which the inquisitive king puzzled his brains to know how the apples got into it, and the visit of his Majesty to Whitbread's brewery, are still as amusing as when they were written; and few of the personages in grave historical biography stand out with half the force which characterises this careless lighthearted picture, in which the fun is so much more prominent than the satire.-OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1882, The Literary History of England, XVIIIth-XIXth Century, vol. II, p. 184.

Neither Charles the Second at the hands of Marvell, nor George the Fourth at the hands of Moore, received anything like the steady fire of lampoon which Wolcot for years poured upon the most harmless and respectable of English monarchs. George the Third had indeed no vices,-unless a certain parsimony may be dignified by that name, but he had many foibles of the kind that is more useful to the satirist than even vice. Wolcot's extreme coarseness, his triviality of subject, and a vulgarity of thought which is quite a different thing from either, are undeniable. But "The Lousiad" (a perfect triumph of cleverness expended on what the Greeks called rhyparography), the famous pieces on George and the Apple Dumplings and on the King's visit to Whitbread's Brewery, with scores of other things of the same kind (the best of all, perhaps, being the record of the Devonshire Progress), exhibit incredible felicity and fertility. in the lower kinds of satire.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 22.