a laurelled bard, by fortune raised,
By very few was read, by fewer praised,"

Pope, as cavalierly, in the "Dunciad":--

"She saw old Prynne in restless Daniel shine,
And Eusden eke out Blackmore's endless line."

Jacobs, in his "Lives of the Poets," speaks of him as a multifarious
writer of unreadable trash,--and names but few of his productions. The
truth was, Eusden, secluding himself at his rectory among the fens of
Lincolnshire, took no part in society, declined all association with
the polite circles of the metropolis, thus inviting attacks, from
which his talents were not respectable enough to screen him. That the
loftiest revelations of poetry were not required of the Laureate of
George I., who understood little or no English, there can be no
question. George II. was equally insensible to the Muses; and had the
annual lyrics been a mosaic of the merest gibberish, they would have
satisfied his earlier tastes as thoroughly as the odes of Collins or
Gray. A court, at which Pope and Swift, Young and Thomson were
strangers, had precisely that share of Augustan splendor which enabled
such as Eusden to shine lustrously.[7]

And so Eusden shone and wrote, and in the fulness of time--September,
1730--died and was buried; and his laurel others desired.[8] The
leading claimants were Richard Savage and Colley Cibber. The touching
story of Savage had won the heart of the Queen, and she had extracted
from the King the promise of the Laureateship for its hero. But in the
Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, Savage had an irreconcilable opponent.
The apprehension of exciting powerful enmities, if he elevated the
"Bastard" and his wrongs to so conspicuous a place, had, no doubt, an
influence with the shrewd statesman. Possibly, too, so keen and
practical a mind could not but entertain thorough contempt for the
man, who, with brains, thews, and sinews of his own, a fair education,
and as many golden opportunities of advancement as a reasonable being
could desire, should waste his days in profitless mendicancy at the
doors of great people, in whining endeavors to excite the sympathies
of the indifferent, in poem and petition, in beastly drunkenness, or,
if sober, in maudlin lamentations at the bitterness of his fortune. A
Falconbridge would have better suited the ministerial taste. At all
events, when his Majesty came to request the appointment of the
Queen's _protege_, he found that the patent had already been made out
in the