THE MONARCH PLAYER.

Question and answer he by turns must be,
Like that small wit in Modern Tragedy

Who, to patch up his fame-or fill his purse

Still pilfers wretched plans, and makes them worse;
Like gypsies, lest the stolen brat be known,
Defacing first, then claiming for his own.
In shabby state they strut, and tatter'd robe;
The scene a blanket, and a barn the globe.
No high conceits their moderate wishes raise,
Content with humble profit, humble praise.
Let dowdies simper, and let bumpkins stare,
The strolling pageant hero treads in air:
Pleas'd for his hour, he to mankind gives law,
And snores the next out on a truss of straw.

But if kind Fortune, who sometimes we know
Can take a hero from a puppet show,

In mood propitious should her fav'rite call,
On royal stage in royal pomp to bawl,
Forgetful of himself he rears the head,

And scorns the dunghill where he first was bred.
Conversing now with well-dress'd kings and queens,
With gods and goddesses behind the scenes,
He sweats beneath the terror-nodding plume,
Taught by mock honours real pride to assume.
On this great stage, the World, no monarch e'er
Was half so haughty as a monarch-player.

39

The effect of the Apology, as we have said, was instant and decisive. Smollett wrote to Garrick (we are told by Davies) to ask him to make it known to Mr. Churchill, that he was not the writer of the notice of the Rosciad in the Critical Review. Garrick wrote to Lloyd (we owe the publication of the letter to Mr. Pickering) to praise Mr.

Churchill's genius, and to grieve that he should not have been vindicated by their common friend from Mr. Churchill's displeasure. The player accepted the poet's warning. There was no fear of his repeating the bêtise he had committed. To his most distinguished friends, to even the Dukes and Dowagers of his acquaintance, he was careful never to omit in future his good word for Mr. Churchill. Never, even when describing the "misery” the Rosciad had inflicted on a dear companion, did he forget his own "love to Churchill." Affection for the satirist prevailed still over pity for his victims; and they lived in amity, and Churchill dined at Hampton, to the last.

"I have seen the poem you mention, the Rosciad," writes Garrick's friend, Bishop Warburton, "and was surprised at the excellent things I found in it; but took Churchill's to be a feigned name, so little do I know of what is going forward;"—this good Bishop little thinking how soon he was to discover a reality to himself in what was going forward, hardly less bitter than Garrick had confessed in the letter to Lloyd, "of acting a pleasantry of countenance while his back was most wofully striped with the cat-o'-nine tails." The lively actor nevertheless subjoined: "I will show the superiority I have over my brethren upon this occasion, by seeming at least that I am not dissatisfied." He did not succeed.

The

acting was not so good as usual, and the superiority not so obvious. For in truth his brethren had the best of it, in proportion as they had less interest in the art so bitterly, and, it must be added, so unjustly assailed. "It was no small consolation to us," says Davies, with great naïveté, "that our master was not spared." Some of the more sensible went so far as to join in the laugh that had been raised against them; and Shuter asked to be allowed to compote and make merry with the satirist a request at once conceded.

On the other hand, with not a few, the publication of Churchill's name had aggravated offence, and re-opened the smarting wound. But they did not mend the matter. Their Anti-Rosciads, Triumvirates, Examiners, and Churchilliads, making what reparation and revenge they could, amounted to but the feeble admission of their opponent's strength; nor did hostilities more personal accomplish other than precisely this. Parties who had met to devise retaliation, and who were observed talking loud against the "Satirical Parson" in the Bedford coffeehouse, quietly dispersed when a brawny figure appeared, and Churchill, drawing off his gloves with a particularly slow composure, called for a dish of coffee and the Rosciad. Their fellow-performer, Yates, seeing the same figure darken the parlour-door of the Rose tavern where he happened to be sitting, snatched up a case

knife to do summary justice; and was never upon the stage so heartily laughed at as when, somewhat more quietly, he laid it down. Foote wrote a lampoon against the "Clumsy Curate," and with a sensible after-thought of fear, excellent matter of derision to the victims of a professed lampooner, suppressed it. Arthur Murphy less wisely published his, and pilloried himself; his Ode to the Naiads of Fleet Ditch being but a gross confession of indecency as well as imbecility—which was more than Churchill charged him with.

"No more he'll sit," exclaimed this complacent and courageous counter-satirist, whose verses, silly as they are, will give us a glimpse of the where and the how our hero sat at the theatre,

"In foremost row before the astonish'd pit;
In brawn Oldmixon's rival as in wit;

And grin dislike,

And kiss the spike;

And giggle,

And wriggle;

And fiddle,

And diddle," &c. &c.

But Churchill returned to his front row, "by Arthur undismayed;" and still formidable was his broad burly face when seen from the stage behind that spike of the orchestra. "In this place he thought he could best discern the real workings of the passions in the actors, or

THE SATIRIST IN THE PIT.

43

what they substituted in the stead of them," says Davies, who had good reason to know the place. There is an affecting letter of his in the Garrick Correspondence, deprecating the manager's wrath. "During the run of Cymbeline," he says-and of course, as holder of the heavy business, he had to bear the burden of royalty in that play-"I had the misfortune to disconcert you in one scene for which I did immediately beg your pardon, and did attribute it to my accidentally seeing Mr. Churchill in the pit, with great truth; it rendering me confused and unmindful of my business." Garrick might have been more tolerant of poor Davies, recollecting that on a recent occasion even the royal robes of Richard had not rapt himself from the consciousness of that ominous figure in the pit; and that he had grievingly written to Colman of his sense of the archcritic's too apparent discontent.*

Thus, then, had Churchill, in little more than two months, sprung into a notoriety of a very remarkable, perhaps not of a very enviable kind, made up of admiration and alarm. What other satirists had desired to shrink from, he seemed eager to brave; and the man, not less than the poet, challenged with an air of defiance the talk of the town. Pope had a tall Irishman to

*"My love to Churchill; his being sick of Richard was perceived about the house."