There were replies and hostile reviews, and Churchill, in "The Apology," assailed Garrick as "the vain tyrant" with
His puny green-room wits and venal bards.
Garrick is said not to have dared to contemn things contemptible, and to have propitiated Churchill. As ally of Jack Wilkes, he "took the Wilkes and Liberty" to assail Scotland in "The Prophecy of Famine".
Waft me, some Muse, to Tweed's inspiring stream
. . . . . . . . . .
Where, slowly winding the dull waters creep
And seem themselves to own the power of sleep.
In fact, "the glittering and resolute streams of Tweed," as the old Cromwellian angler, Richard Franck, styles them, are only dull and sleepy in the "dubs" where England provides their flat southern bank.
In 1763 Churchill assailed Hogarth in an epistle, and Hogarth replied in kind with a truly English caricature. He wrote several other satires and a Hudibrastic skit, in Four Books, on Dr. Johnson's incursion into psychical research, in the matter of the famous Cock Lane Ghost. Churchill died at Boulogne, in November, 1764, and is buried at Dover. In private life he displayed some kindly and honourable qualities, and Byron, before leaving England for ever, in 1816, consecrated a poem to his grave. To the discredit of Scotland, Dr. Beattie lampooned Churchill—after he was dead!
George Crabbe.
Born more than twenty years after Cowper, but making his first noticeable entry into literature at the same time as he, Crabbe belongs in curious ways to different schools and different ages. In verse he follows the tradition of Pope and Goldsmith; writing, in his best-known works, in the rhymed ten syllables, and much influenced by Goldsmith's "Deserted Village," and by reaction against the smiling conventional "pastorals", But perhaps Crabbe's genius, stern and almost grim, was unfortunate in finding no other vendible vehicle of his thought than verse, for his natural bent was to the modern "realistic" novel on the squalor, sufferings and sins of the neglected rural poor. He had a genius like that of several modern novelists, for painting all that in nature or human nature is dark, lowering, and sullen; he is unsparingly devoted to actual study from the life; and yet he has a peculiar humour of his own. His later works were "Tales," short stories in the measure of Pope, but destitute of brilliance, and extremely prolix, so that, though these narratives in verse were apparently more popular than the contemporary novels of Miss Austen, the rapid rise and universal popularity of the prose novel began to deprive Crabbe of readers even in his own later years. Crabbe, who had been praised by Dr. Johnson, lived to enjoy the generous applause of Scott, Byron, Miss Austen, and, what was more rare, the approval of Wordsworth. But as, in the beginning of his career, he censured the Newspaper as the supplanter of poetry, so, before his death in 1832, he found that the world preferred novels in prose to short tales of modern life in verse. He profited by the brief period of the bloom of poetry, but his biographer, Canon Ainger, observes that "Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day". The gaiety and grace which in Cowper alternate with gloom, and make many of his poems so generally familiar, were not elements in the genius of Crabbe.
He was born at Aldeburgh, on the coast of Suffolk, on Christmas Eve, 1754, the son of a man who had been a schoolmaster, but later obtained a small post in the Customs. In Crabbe's day Aldeburgh was not, as now, a watering-place, but through the inroads of the sea, was become a squalid smuggling village with a desolate background of poor and ill-cultivated land: as described in "The Village". Crabbe was from childhood a great devourer of books, and at the second of his two country schools acquired Latin enough for his later purposes. He was apprenticed to a surgeon, fell early in love, at 18 won a prize for a magazine poem, "Hope," made songs to his mistress's eyebrow, printed (1775) a moral poem ("Inebriety"), at Ipswich practised medicine in a humble way, and in April, 1780, went to London with his surgical instruments and three pounds in his pocket. He wrote poems which were declined by publishers; though there was an opening for a poet—