From Richmond he removed to Acton-Common, where he had a house furnished with great elegance—"kept a post-chaise, saddle-horses, and pointers—and fished, fowled, hunted, coursed, and lived in an easy independent manner." There he continued his irregular but rapid and energetic course of composition, pouring out poem after poem as if he felt his time to be short, or as if he were spurred on by the secret stings of misery and remorse. To "The Duellist" succeeded "The Author,"—a poem more general and less poisoned with personalities than any of his former. "Gotham," by far the most poetical of his works, came next. When Lord Sandwich stood for the High-Stewardship of Cambridge, Churchill's ancient grudge, as well as his itch for satire, revived, and he improvised "The Candidate," a piece of hasty but terrible sarcasm. With breathless and portentous rapidity followed "The Farewell," "The Times," and "Independence," which was his last published production. Two fragments were found among his MSS., one "A Dedication to Warburton," and another, "The Journey," his latest effort, and in which the last line now seems prophetic—
"I on my journey all alone proceed."
A far and final journey was before this great and ill-fated poet. He was seized with one of those sudden longings to see a friend, which are not uncommon with the impulsive. He determined to visit Wilkes at Boulogne, and conveyed his purpose to his brother John in the following note:—"Dear Jack, adieu, C.C." On the 22d of October 1764, he started for France, met Wilkes; but on the 29th was seized with miliary fever, under which, while imprudently removed from his bed to be conveyed at his own desire to England, his constitution sunk, and he expired on the 4th of November, in the thirty-third year of his age. He is said to have died calmly and firmly, rebuking the excessive grief of his friends, and repeating some manly but not very Christian lines from his own poetry. By a will made during his sickness, he left an annuity of sixty pounds to his wife (in addition, we suppose, to her former allowance), fifty pounds a-year to Miss Carr, besides providing for his two boys, and leaving mourning rings to his more intimate friends. Wilkes got the charge of all his works. His body was brought to Dover, where he now sleeps in an old churchyard, which once belonged to the church of St Martin, with a stone over him, bearing his age, the date of his death, and this line from one of his own poems—
"Life to the last enjoy'd, here Churchill lies."
The words which he is reported to have used on his deathbed, should have been inscribed on the stone—
"What a fool I have been!"
Hogarth had expired on the 25th of October, ten days before his opponent. Lloyd was finishing his dinner, when the news of his friend's death arrived. He was seized with sudden sickness, and crying out, "I shall soon follow poor Charles," was carried to a bed, whence he was never to rise. Churchill's favourite sister, Patty, who had been engaged to Lloyd, soon afterwards sank under the double blow. The premature death of this most popular of the poets of the time, excited a great sensation. His furniture and books sold excessively high; a steel pen, for instance, for five pounds, and a pair of plated spurs for sixteen guineas. Wilkes talked much about his "dear Churchill," but, with the exception of burning a MS. fragmentary satire, which Churchill had begun against Colman and Thornton, two of his intimate friends, and erecting an urn to him near his cottage in the Isle of Wight, with a flaming Latin inscription, he did nothing for his memory. The poet's brother, John, an apothecary, survived him only one year; and his two sons, Charles and John, inherited the vices without the genius of their father. There was, as late as 1825, a grand-daughter of his, a Mary Churchill, who had been a governess, surviving as a patient in St George's Hospital,—a characteristic close to such a wayward, unfortunate race.
For the errors of Churchill, as a man, there does not seem to exist any plea of palliation, except what may be found in the poverty of his early circumstances, and in the strength of his later passions. The worst is, that he never seems to have been seduced into sin through the bewildering and bewitching mists of imagination. It was naked sensuality that he appeared to worship, and he always sinned with his eyes open. Yet his moral sense, though blunted, was never obliterated; and many traits of generosity and good feeling mingled with his excesses. Choosing satire as the field of his Muse, was partly the cause and partly the effect of an imperfect morale. We are far from averring that no satirist can be a good man, but certainly most satirists have either been very good or very bad men. To the former class have belonged Cowper, Crabbe, &c.; to the latter, such names as Swift, Dryden, Byron, and, we must add, Churchill. Robust manhood, honesty, and hatred of pretence, we admit him to have possessed; but of genuine love to humanity he seems to have been as destitute as of fear of God, or regard for the ordinary moralities.
We have to deal with him, however, principally as a poet; and there can, we think, now be but one opinion as to his peculiar merits. He possessed, beyond all doubt, a strong understanding, a lively imagination, a keen perception of character—especially in its defects and weaknesses—considerable wit without any humour, fierce passions and hatreds, and a boundless command of a loose, careless, but bold and energetic diction; add to this, a constant tone of self-assertion, and rugged independence. He was emphatically a John Bull, sublimated. He rushed into the poetic arena more like a pugilist than a poet, laying about him on all sides, giving and taking strong blows, and approving himself, in the phrase of "the fancy," game to the backbone. His faults, besides those incident to most satirists,—such as undue severity, intrusion into private life, anger darkening into malignity, and spleen fermenting into venom,—were carelessness of style, inequality, and want of condensation. Compared to the satires of Pope, Churchill's are far less polished, and less pointed. Pope stabs with a silver bodkin—Churchill hews down his opponent with a broadsword. Pope whispers a word in his enemy's ear which withers the heart within him, and he sinks lifeless to the ground; Churchill pours out a torrent of blasting invective which at once kills and buries his foe. Dryden was his favourite model; and although he has written no such condensed masterpieces of satire as the characters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham, yet his works as a whole are not much inferior, and justify the idea that had his life been spared, he might have risen to the level of "Glorious John." His versification, too, is decidedly of the Drydenic type. It is a free, fierce, rushing, sometimes staggering, race across meadow, moor, and mountain, dreading nothing except repose and languor, the lines chasing, and sometimes tumbling over each other in their haste, like impatient hounds at a fox-hunt. But more than Dryden, we think, has Churchill displayed the genuine poetic faculty, as well as often a loftier tone of moral indignation. This latter feeling is the inspiration of "The Candidate," and of "The Times," which, although coarse in subject, and coarse in style, burns with a fire of righteous indignation, reminding you of Juvenal. The finest display of his imaginative power is in "Gotham," which is throughout a glorious rhapsody, resembling some of the best prose effusions of Christopher North, and abounding in such lines as these:—
"The cedar, whose top mates the highest cloud,
Whilst his old father Lebanon grows proud
Of such a child, and his vast body laid
Out many a mile, enjoys the filial shade."