After this period of his life, the majority of his biographers assert that he retired to Wales upon a curacy of £30 a-year, and turned cyder merchant; a speculation which failed, and terminated in a sort of rural bankruptcy. This is contradicted by the editor of his works, in 1804. who, in an account of his life drawn from the most authentic sources, says that Churchill succeeded to his father's curacy of Rainham, in Essex. At this place, according to the latter authority, he opened a school, but gave it up on the death of his father, in 1758, when he came to London, and was appointed to the situation of the former, as curate and lecturer of St. John's. He fulfilled the duties of his office for some time with great credit and regularity; and, to improve his finances, taught young ladies, at a boardingschool, to read and write English, and gave private lessons in the classics to the youth of the other sex. "Such," says his latest biographer, "was Charles Churchill, until he was twenty-seven years of age; at which time a total alteration took place in his general system of conduct and behaviour in life." This alteration is to be dated from the renewal of his intimacy with his friend, Robert Lloyd, the poet, whose lively and generous, but dissipated disposition, began soon to infect Churchill, and to involve him in pecuniary difficulties, from which he saw no prospect of relief. In this exigency, his friend's father, Dr. Lloyd, then second master of Westminster School, advanced a sufficient sum to pay his creditors a composition of five shillings in the pound, though, to the honour of Churchill, he afterwards paid them their whole demands. At this time he appears to have been intimate with several of the wits; and a desire of sharing their reputation and of improving his circumstances, incited him to a display of his poetical talents. His first productions were The Bard, and The Conclave; neither of which were printed, his earliest publication being that of The Rosciad, which appeared without his name in 1761. It became at once popular; but the real author was so little suspected, that many of the reviewers ascribed it to different writers by name; and The Critical Review declared it, in positive terms, to

be the production of Lloyd. To a second edition Churchill prefixed his name, and the actors having been loud in their censure against it, he afterwards justified his remarks, in An Apology, addressed to the Critical Reviewers; in which the profession of a player was treated with equal humour and contempt.

These performances obtained for him immediate celebrity, and an introduction to the first wits of the day, and encouraged him to persevere in a pursuit which he found to be more agreeable than the duties of a parish curate. His conduct altered with his sentiments; he plunged into dissipation; quarrelled and parted from his wife; dressed in a blue coat, and gold-laced waistcoat; and was guilty of so many indiscretions, that at length such an outery was raised against him, as induced him to resign the curacy and lectureship of St. John's. His letter to a friend after this step had been taken, strongly depicts the recklessness of his character at this period of his life :-" I have got rid," he says, "of both my causes of complaint: the woman I was tired of, and the gown I was displeased with. Why should I breathe in wretchedness and a rusty gown, when my muse can furnish me with felicity and a laced coat? Besides, why should I play the hypocrite? Why should I seem contented with my lowly situation, when I am ambitious to aspire at, and wish for, a much higher? Why should I be called to account, by a dull phlegmatic

for not wearing white thread stockings, when I desire to wear white silk ones, and a sword? In short, I have looked into myself, and I have found I am better qualified to be a gentleman than a poor curate. I find no pricks of conscience for what I have done, but am much easier in my mind. I feel myself in the situation of a man that has carried a dd heavy load for a long way, and then sets down." He now frequented taverns, and took part in the principal midnight orgies, which are faithfully described by Charles Johnson, in his Adventures of a Guinea. The reproaches which his conduct called forth he attempted to defend publicly in a poem, entitled Night, in which he merely argued that open and avowed profligacy is less criminal than hypocritical sanctity. His next publication was

fivid, which did not add much to the author's popularity. He was more successful in the Prophecy of Famine, a Scots pastoral, which immediately raised him to the first degree of rank as a political satirist, and was highly praised by Wilkes, who called it at once personal, poetical, and political. At this time he seems to have had some share in the North Briton, and he was included in the warrant issued for the apprehension of Wilkes, who prevented his being taken, by addressing him, before the officers, in the name of Thompson. Soon afterwards, he published An Epistle to Hogarth, whose death it is said to have hastened, after he had inade a feeble attempt to retaliate on the poet, by caricaturing him in a print of a pug-dog and a bear. In 1763, he published The Conference, in which he expressed his contrition for his previous seduction and abandonment of a tradesman's daughter, in Westminster, and whom, in the above year, he thought himself bound in honour to take into his protection. About the same period, he successively published The Duellist, and The Author, one of the most pleasing of his productions. "It is but justice," said the Critical Reviewers, "to acknowledge that Mr. Churchill's reputation as a poet seems to rise and increase with every performance. Conference was much superior to The Ghost, and The Author is, in our opinion, a better poem than The Conference. The sentiments throughout are, for the most part, noble and manly, the satire finely pointed, and the expression strong and nervous."

44

The

In 1764, he poured forth several new productions, "evidently," says Dr. Aikin, inspired by no other muse than necessity, and accumulating all the faults with few of the beauties of the former." The titles of these poems were Gotham, The Candidate, The Times, Independence, and The Journey; besides a volume of Sermons, almost beneath notice. In the October of the year last-mentioned, he paid a visit to Wilkes, at Boulogne, where he was seized with a miliary fever, which carried him off, ou the 4th of November, in the thirty-fourth year of his age. He was buried at Dover, and the

Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.

The natural disposition of Churchill was frank, open, warm, generous, and benevolent; and, in his boyhood, he gave proofs of a high and noble spirit, almost amounting to heroism. In the early part of his clerical career, nothing could be more exemplary than his conduct, and he was, for a time, equally beloved and respected. As his poetical talents developed themselves, his character changed, and he can be only afterwards contemplated as a witty, reckless, but not remorseless, debauchee. He still preserved his warmth of heart, and his independence of mind; and it is said that he refused an offer of £300 per annum to cease from writing against certain political measures, and threatened to kick out of his house the parties by whom the proposition was made to him. Something, however, like heartlessness appears in his bitter attacks upon Hogarth and others; but it was the fault of Churchill never to let an arrow rest in his quiver; his bow of satire was always ready, and when once bent, he took the first mark that presented itself, heedless of the justice of the aim or the depth of the wound. Still, with all his irregularities and vices, he possessed qualities which captivated and endeared him to, those who knew him thoroughly; his friends were enthusiastically devoted to him.-Lloyd fo.lowed him to the grave with a broken heart; and Wilkes testified his affection for him, by the erection of a pillar to his memory, in the grove of Sandham College, in the Isle of Wight.

The writings of Churchill have been described to be like his life,-irregular, unequal, and inconsistent. He was a professed imitator of Dryden; but amid much strength, fire and brilliancy, is to be found the roughness of Oidhain and Donne, and a carelessness which he used to pass off as the result of design. The temporary nature of his subjects have caused a gradual decline of his former popularity; and Byron, therefore, not unaptly speaks of him as one "who blazed the comet of a season." It is not strange that he should have received little ap, lause from his contemporaries, against one or other of

whom he was continually levelling his satirical shafts; whence Johnson, whom he satirized in The Ghost, under the name of Pomposo, said, with more acrimony than propriety, "that he thought Churchill a shallow fellow in the beginning, and had seen no reason for altering his opinion." Cowper, however, has paid a tribute to his talents, which more than compensates for the silence of greater critics, worse poets,

and inferior men: the lines will be found in his Table Talk

If brighter beams than all he threw not forth,
'Twas negligence in him,-not want of worth;
Surly and slovenly, and bold, and coarse,
Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force;
Spendthrift alike of money and of wit,
Always at speed, and never drawing bit,-
He struck the lyre in such a careless mood,
And so disdained the rules he understood;
The laurel seemed to wait on his command,
He snatched it rudely from the Muse's hand.

WILLIAM, son of the Reverend Dr. | John Cowper, chaplain to George the Second, was born at Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire, of which place his father was rector, on the 26th of November, 1731. He received the earliest rudiments of education at a day-school in his native village; and in his seventh year, at which time he lost his mother, he was placed under the care of Dr. Pitman, of Market Street, where he remained about eighteen months, when he was removed, in consequence of some specks appearing in his eyes, from which blindness was apprehended.

My father," he says in one of his letters, "alarmed for the consequences, sent me to a female oculist, of great renown at that time, in whose house I abode two years, but to no good purpose. From her I went to Westminster School, where, at the age of fourteen, the smallpox seized me, and proved the better oculist of the two, for it delivered me from them all." During his stay at this school, he was remarkable alike for his close attention to his studies, and his gentle disposition, which exposed him to insults and cruelties from his schoolfellows, that he never recollected but with anguish. His own for cible expression, says his biographer, Hayley, rep esented him at Westminster, as not daring to raise his eye above the shoe-buckle of the elder boys.

He let Westminster in 1749; and, about three months afterwards, was placed with Mr. Chapman, a solicitor, in London; but, from the following passage in a letter to his relative, Lady Hesketh, he does not appear to have

paid much attention to legal studies. He says, in a playful remonstrance"I did actually live three years with Mr. Chapman, a solicitor, that is to say, I slept three years in his house; but I lived, that is to say, I spent my days in Southampton Row, as you very well remember. There was 1, and the future lord-chancellor (Thurlow), constantly employed from morning till night in giggling and making giggle, instead of studying law." On leaving Mr. Chapman, he took chambers in, and became a student of, the Middle Temple; and, forming an intimacy with his schoolfellows, the elder Colman, Bonnel, Thornton and Lloyd, he assisted the two first in their celebrated periodical, The Connoisseur; and otherwise indulged his taste for the belles lettres, both in prose and poetry.

Success at the bar, with Cowper's frame of mind, his friends had little hopes of, and, therefore, procured for him the situation of reading-clerk, and clerk of the private committees in the house of lords, to which he was appointed in his thirty-first year. Being unable, however, to undergo the torture, as he called it, of reading in public, he resigned these offices after a week's struggle, and accepted that of clerk of the journals, in which it was supposed his personal appearance would not be required in the house of lords. A parliamentary dispute, however, making it necessary for him to appear at the bar of the house, that his fitness for the employment might be publicly acknowledged, his nerves were so wrought upon by the idea of such a public exhibition of

himself, which he called a mortal poison, that the strength of his reason gave way, and on the arrival of the period for his appearance, he was no longer in possession of his intellectual powers. In this distressing state, it was found necessary to place hin under the care of Dr. Cotton, in an asylum at St. Albans, where he remained from December, 1763, until the July of the following year, in a state of mental aberration, and of a religious despondency to such a degree, that he is said to have been in continual expectation of being instantly plunged into eternal punishment. His mind at length becoming more composed, he began to derive consolation from those truths which had before seemed so terrible to him; and at the invitation of his brother John, a clergyman, and fellow of Cambridge, he removed to Huntingdon, in order to be near him. He had not been long here before his acquaintance commenced with the Unwins, into whose family he was introduced by Mr. Cawthorne Unwin, who, struck with the appearance of Cowper, had accosted him during a walk, which was the beginning of their subsequent intimacy. He continued to reside with them in their house at Huntingdon, until the death of the elder Mr. Unwin, in July, 1767, to which our author thus alludes in a letter to Lady Hesketh.

"The effect

of it upon my circumstances will only be a change of the place of my abode; for I shall still, by God's leave, continue with Mrs. Unwin, whose behaviour to me has always been that of a mother to a son." With this lady (the Mary of his poems,) and her daughter, he removed, in the following October, to Olney, in Buckinghamshire, on the solicitation of the Rev. Mr. Newton, the rector of that place, and with whom Cowper formed one of the most close and delightful friendships of his life. Religious meditation and the exercise of charity, in which he was encouraged by an annual allowance, for that purpose, of £200 a-year, from John Thornton, Esquire, formed his chief occupation; and, writing to decline the invitation of a friend, in 1769, he says, he "prefers his home to any other spot on earth." Among other employments, he composed sixty-eight hymns, which were inserted in Mr. Newton's collections, and

he personally directed the prayers and devotions of the poor. Such a life, however, had a tendency to increase the morbid propensity of his frame, which was increased in March, 1770, by the death of his brother John, whom he had taken great pains to imbue with his own religious views, and, after some difficulty, succeeded. In 1773, he “sunk into such severe paroxysnis of religious despondency," says Hayley, "that he required an attendant of the most gentle, vigilant, and inflexible spirit ;" and, he adds, "such an attendant he found in his faithful guardian, Mrs. Unwin, who watched over him during this long fit of depressive malady, extended through several years, with that perfect mixture of tenderness and fortitude, which constitutes the inestimable influence of maternal protection."

In the beginning of 1778, his mind began to recover itself; but, before it was sufficiently established to allow of his return to literary pursuits, he amused himself in educating a group of tame hares, an account of which he wrote in prose for The Gentleman's Magazine. In the summer of the same year, having completely regained the use of his faculties, he resumed his correspondence with his friends, and diverted himself by drawing, carpentering, and gardening. "I am pleased," he says, in a letter, dated 1780, to Mr. Newton, who had removed to London, "with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ever be worth a farthing; amuse myself with a green-house, which Lord Bute's gardener could take upon his back, and walk away with; and when I have paid it the accustomed visit, and watered it, and given it air, I say to myself- This is not mine; 'tis a plaything lent me for the present: I must leave it soon.' In the last-mentioned and the following year he wrote several poems, besides a translation of some of the spiritual songs of Madame Guion; and, in 1782, an octavo volume was published, at the expense of Johnson, of St. Paul's Church-yard, who took the whole risk upon himself. The principal subjects are Table Talk, The Progress of Error, Truth, Expostulation, Hope, Retirement, Charity, and Conversation, by which he at once established his reputation as a poet, though they gained