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. This satire Wolcot
could apply with remarkable width of range. His artistic satires (and it
must be admitted that he had not bad taste here) have been noticed. He
riddled the new devotion to physical science in the unlucky person of
Sir Joseph Banks; the chief of his literary lampoons, a thing which is
quite a masterpiece in its way, is his "Bozzy and Piozzi," wherein
Boswell and Mrs. Thrale are made to string in amoebean fashion the
most absurd or the most laughable of their respective reminiscences of
Johnson into verses which, for lightness and liveliness of burlesque
representation, have hardly a superior. Until the severe legislation
which followed the Jacobin terror in France cowed him, and to some
extent even subsequently, Wolcot maintained a sort of Ishmaelite
attitude, by turns attacking and defending himself against men of
eminence in literature and politics, after a fashion the savagery
whereof was excused sometimes by its courage and nearly always by an
exuberant good-humour which both here and elsewhere accompanies very
distinct ill-nature. His literary life in London covered about a quarter
of a century, after which, losing his sight, he retired once more to the
West, though he is said to have died at Somers Town in 1819. The best
edition of his works is in five good-sized volumes, but it is known not
to be complete.

Both the _Rolliad_ men and Wolcot had been on the Whig, Wolcot almost on
the Republican side; and for some years they had met with no sufficient
adversaries, though Gifford soon engaged "Peter" on fairly equal terms.
The great revulsion of feeling, however, which the acts of the French
Revolution induced among Englishmen generally drew on a signal rally on
the Tory part. The _Anti-Jacobin_ newspaper, with Gifford as its editor,
and Canning, Ellis (now a convert), and Frere as its chief contributors,
not merely had