ntance of a Tory, and in play and prologue missed no chance
of testifying devotion to liberal opinions.[5] His investiture with
the laurel was only another proof that at moments of revolution
extremists first rise to the surface. A man of affluent fortune, and
the recipient of redundant favors from the new ministry, Rowe enjoyed
the sunshine of life, while the dethroned Nahum starved in the Mint,
as the dethroned James starved at Rome. Had the dramatic tribute still
been exacted, there is little doubt that the author of the "Fair
Penitent," and of "Jane Shore," would have lent splendid lustre to his
office. His odes, however,--such, at least, as have been thought
worthy of preservation among his works,--are a prodigious improvement
upon the tenuity of his predecessor, and immeasurably superior in
poetical fire and elegance to those of any successor antecedent to
Warton.

For, following Nicholas Rowe, there were dark ages of Laureate
dulness,--a period redeemed by nothing, unless by the ridicule and
controversy to which the wearers of the leaf gave occasion. Rowe died
in the last days of 1718. The contest for the vacant place is presumed
to have been unusually active. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire,
imitating Suckling's "Session of the Poets," brings all the
versifiers of the time into the canvas, and after humorously
dispatching one after another, not sparing himself, closes,--

"At last, in rushed Eusden, and cried, 'Who shall have it,
But I, the true Laureate, to whom the King gave it?'
Apollo begged pardon, and granted his claim,
But vowed, though, till then, he ne'er heard of his name."[6]

This Laurence Eusden was a scribbling parson, whose model in Art was
Sir Richard Blackmore, and whose morality was of the Puritanical
stripe. He had assisted Garth in his Ovid, assuming, doubtless upon
high moral grounds, the rendering of the impurest fables. He had
written odes to great people upon occasions more or less great,
therein exhibiting some ingenuity in varying the ordinary staple of
adulation. He had addressed an epithalamium to the Duke of Newcastle
upon his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin,--a tribute so
gratifying to his Grace, then Lord Chamberlain, as to secure the poet
the place of Rowe. Eusden's was doubtless the least honorable name as
yet associated with the laurel. His contemporaries allude to him with
uniform disdain. Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, tells us,--

"Eusden,