was abandoned, and
Wilkes emerged from his literary retreat.

Wilkes has been very bitterly and, as it would appear, very unjustly
upbraided for his seeming neglect of his dead friend's wishes, of his
dead defender's fame. In spite of {70} those whose zeal for the memory
of Churchill drives them into antagonism with the memory of Wilkes, it
may be believed that the task was not one "for which Wilkes could, with
the greatest ease, have procured all the necessary materials; and to
which he was called not by the sacred duties of friendship only, but by
the plainest considerations of even the commonest gratitude." Even if
Wilkes had been, which Wilkes was not, the kind of a man to make a good
editor, a good annotator, the difficulties that lay in the way of the
execution of his task were too many. The fact that the poems were so
largely about himself gave a sufficient if not an almost imperative
reason why he should leave the task alone. But in any case he must
have felt conscious of what events proved, that there was other work
for him to do in the world than the editing of other men's satires.

Not, indeed, that the genius of Churchill needed any tribute that
Wilkes or any one else could bestow. His monument is in his own
verses, in the story of his life. If indeed the lines from "The
Candidate" which are inscribed on Churchill's tombstone tell the truth,
if indeed his life was "to the last enjoyed," part of that enjoyment
may well have come from the certainty that the revolutions of time
would never quite efface his name or obscure his memory. The
immortality of the satirist must almost inevitably be an immortality
rather historical than artistic; it is rather what he says than how he
says it which is accounted unto him for good. As there are passages of
great poetic beauty in the satires of Juvenal, so there are passages of
poetic beauty in the satires of Churchill. But they are both
remembered, the great Roman and the great Englishman, less for what
beauty their work permitted than for the themes on which they exercised
their wit. The study of Churchill is as essential to a knowledge of
the eighteenth century in London as the study of Juvenal is essential
to a knowledge of the Rome of his time. That fame Churchill had
secured for himself; to that fame nothing that Wilkes or any one else
might do could add.

{71}

CHAPTER XLVI.

THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

[Sidenote: 1765--Grenville as Bute's succes