ungry placeman
in London who had not as just pretensions to the honor. What poetical
gifts he had displayed had been in school or college exercises. His
real claims consisted in having spent a fortune in electioneering for
ministers; and these claims being pressed with unusual urgency at the
moment of Warton's death, he was offered the Laureateship as
satisfaction in part.[19] He eagerly accepted it, and received the
balance two years later in the shape of a commission as Police
Magistrate of Middlesex. Thereafter, like Henry Fielding, or Gilbert
A'Beckett, he divided his days between penal law and polite
literature. His version of the "Poetics" of Aristotle, with
illustrations drawn liberally from recent authors, was perhaps
begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications
for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama
was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions,
his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a
writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was
wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose
tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In
addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried
his hand at an epic,--the subject, King Alfred,--the plot and
treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to
the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the
trunk-maker,--not, however, before an American publisher was found
daring enough to reprint it. There are also to be mentioned
translations from Pindar, Horace, and other classics, for Sharpe's
edition of the British Poets, a collection to which he lent editorial
aid. "Poet Pye"[20] was fortunate in escaping contemporary wit and
satire. Gifford alluded to him, but Gifford's Toryism was security
that no Tory Court-Poet would be roughly handled. Byron passed him in
silence. The Smiths treated him as respectfully as they treated
anybody. Moore's wit at the expense of the Regent and his courtiers
had only found vent in the "Two-Penny Post-Bag" when Pye was gathered
to his predecessors.

That calamity occurred in August, 1813. With it ended the era of
birthday songs and New-Year's verses. The King was mad; his nativity
was therefore hardly a rational topic of rejoicing. The Prince Regent
had no taste for the solemn inanity of stipulated ode, the performance
of