It is otherwise with roystering Paul the tailor. Chapel-yard, Holborn, was the cradle (in 1709) of this boisterous and biting poet. His father would have been content to see him take measures to follow his example; but as Hervagault, the first pseudo-Dauphin, quitted his father’s board to make assault upon the throne of Capet, so Paul, backed by his friends, aimed at the realm of rhyme, and would wear his father’s coats, but would not make them. His sire apprenticed him to a mercer; the ambitious son went and entered himself at the Temple.
Paul was one of those daring wits whom profane men most admire; and as the young tailor’s style was one which had respect for neither Olympus nor the mortals, he became a laureate, like William the Baker, but not, like him, poet-laureate to the King.
Paul of Castle-yard was laureate to the “Bucks.” He was a member of the most reprobate clubs of the day. He was a member of the brotherhood of Medenham Abbey,—not of the pious and pot-heaving Cistercians, who gurgled their throats with good old wine, but of the God-denying and profligate crew that had Sir Francis Dashwood for their prior. Paul was the Parny of this and similar sets; and when his patrons required a lay against loyalty, a rhyme against royalty, a metrical kick at kings, songs against statesmen, or diatribes against dunces, the Muse of the tailor’s clever boy was ever ready for the nonce. For clever he was, despite the abuse of Churchill—himself very far from immaculate. If Paul was a reprobate, Churchill was that, and a parson to boot,—two professions which should never be united in one and the same individual. And yet Churchill wrote—
“May I (can worse disgrace on manhood fall?)
Be born a Whitehead, and baptized a Paul!”
The man who wrote these lines was in every way inferior to him against whom they were levelled; certainly inferior to him in talent, though it perhaps may be conceded that he excelled him in vice, power of abuse, and ill-nature.
Paul the tailor was to Churchill, the reverend bruiser, what Cobbett was to Hunt. The first had argument in his assertions; the latter had as little logic as humanity. Paul, too, had taste, and imitated only models of the rarest beauty; and this imitation was better than a low originality without taste at all. His thoughts were marked by a manly strength, and his phrases abound in a rich vein of poetical expression. His quarry was folly wherever found, and particularly “the big, rich, mighty dunces of the State.” Not that dunces, as he said, were to be found there only:—
“Dulness no more roosts only near the sky,
But senates, drawing-rooms, with garrets vie;
Plump Peers and breadless bards alike are dull,