To do Grub Street justice, it was very angry with this appointment, and Hesiod Cooke wrote a poem called ‘The Battle of the Poets,’ in which the new Laureate was severely but truthfully handled in verse not conspicuously better than his own:
‘Eusden, a laurelled bard by fortune rais’d,
By very few been read—by fewer prais’d.’
Eusden is the author of ‘Verses Spoken at the Public Commencement in Cambridge,’ published in quarto, which are said to be indecent. Our authors refer to them as follows:
‘Those prurient lines which we dare not quote, but which the curious may see in the library of the British Museum, were specially composed and repeated for the edification and amusement of some of the noblest and fairest of our great-great-grandmothers.’ Eusden took to drinking and translating Tasso, and died at his living, for he was a parson, of Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
Of William Whitehead you may read in Campbell’s ‘Specimens of the British Poets.’ He was the son of a baker, was school-tutor to Lord Lymington, and having been treated at Oxford in the shabby way that seat of learning has ever treated poets—from Shirley to Calverley—proceeded to Cambridge, that true nest of singing-birds, where he obtained a Fellowship and the post of domestic tutor to the eldest son of the Earl of Jersey. He was always fond of the theatre, and his first effort was a little farce which was never published, but which tempted him to compose heavy tragedies which were. Of these tragedies it would be absurd to speak; they never enjoyed any popularity, either on the stage or in the closet. He owed his appointment—which he did not obtain till Gray had refused it—entirely to his noble friends.
Campbell had the courage to reprint a longish poem of Whitehead’s called ‘Variety: a Tale for Married People.’ It really is not very, very, bad, but it will never be reprinted again; and so I refer ‘the curious’ to Mr. Campbell’s seventh volume.
As for Pye, he was a scholar and a gentleman, a barrister, a member of Parliament, and a police magistrate. On his father’s death he inherited a large estate, which he actually sold to pay his parent’s debts, though he was under no obligation to do so, as in those days a man’s real estate was not liable to pay the debts he might chance to leave undischarged at his death. To pay a dead man’s debts out of his land was to rob his heir. Pye was not famous as a Parliamentary orator, but he was not altogether silent, like Gibbon; for we read that in 1788 he told the House that his constituents had suffered from a scanty hay-harvest. He was appointed Laureate in 1790, and he died in 1813. He was always made fun of as a poet, and, unfortunately for him, there was another poet in the House at the same time, called Charles Small Pybus; hence the jest, ‘Pye et Parvus Pybus,’ which was in everyone’s mouth. He was a voluminous author and diligent translator, but I do not recollect ever seeing a single book of his in a shop, or on a stall, or in a catalogue. As a Poet Great Pye is dead—as dead as Parvus Pybus, M.P., but let us all try hard to remember that he paid his father’s debts out of his own pocket.