Peace to thy gentle shade, and endless rest!
Blest is thy genius, is thy love, too, blest!
And blest that timely from our scene removed,
Thy soul enjoys the liberty it loved.”
Unknown as Rowe has proved to be to fame, he was blest with the respect of his contemporaries, which could not be said of his successor, Lawrence Eusden, then as well as now unknown to fame, and yet he wore the laureate wreath twelve years. Pope abused him in his “Dunciad,” Cooke in the “Battle of the Poets” has this couplet:
“Eusden, a laurel’d bard by fortune raised,
By very few was read, by fewer praised.”
The rhetorician, Oldmixon, says he never met a poet with so much of the “ridiculum and fustian jumbled together, a sort of nonsense which so perfectly confounds all ideas that there is no distinct one left in the mind.” And yet the Georges I. and II. placed the laurel on his brow.
George II., with characteristic misfortune, selected Colley Cibber, whom Pope made famous—I had almost said infamous—in these lines:
“In merry Old England it once was a rule,