sailant was Charles Churchill. He never spares him,--

"Who in the Laureate chair--
By grace, not merit, planted there--
In awkward pomp is seen to sit,
And by his patent proves his wit;
For favors of the great, we know,
Can wit as well as rank bestow;
And they who, without one pretension,
Can get for fools a place or pension,
Must able be supposed, of course,
If reason is allowed due force,
To give such qualities and grace
As may equip them for the place.

"But he who measures as he goes
A mongrel kind of tinkling prose,
And is too frugal to dispense
At once both poetry and sense,--
Who, from amidst his slumbering guards,
Deals out a charge to subject bards,
Where couplets after couplets creep,
Propitious to the reign of sleep," etc.

Again, in the "Prophecy of Famine,"--

"A form, by silken smile, and tone
Dull and unvaried, for the Laureate known,
Folly's chief friend, Decorum's eldest son,
In every party found, and yet of none,
This airy substance, this substantial shade."

And elsewhere he begs for

"Some such draught...
As makes a Whitehead's ode go down,
Or slakes the feverette of Brown."

But satire disturbed not the calm equanimity of the pensioner and
placeman.

"The laurel worn
By poets in old time, but destined now
In grief to wither on a Whitehead's brow,"

continued to fade there, until a whole generation of poets had passed
away. It was not until the middle of April, 1785, that Death made way
for a successor.

The suddenness of Whitehead's decease came near leaving a royal
birthday unsung,--an omission scarcely pardonable with one of George
the Third's methodical habits. An impromptu appointment had to be
made. It was made before the Laureate was buried. Thomas Warton, the
Professor of Poetry at Oxford, received the patent on the 30th of
April, and his ode, married to fitting music, was duly forthcoming on
the 24th of May. The selection of Warton was faultless. His lyrical
verse was the best of a vicious school; his sonnets, according to that
exquisite sonneteer, Sir Egerton Brydges, were the finest in the
language; his "History of English Poetry," of which three volumes had
appeared, displayed an intimate acquaintance with the early English
writers. Nor should we pass unnoticed his criticisms and annotations
upon Milton and Spenser, manifesting as they did the acutest
sensitiveness to the finest beauti