The Common Destiny of Statesmen is lively and imaginative, but too long to be inserted here.
The following lines are also of more than common merit:—
“O Disappointment! but for thee,
What were this land of liberty?
Were’t not for thee on English ground
No trace of Patriot could be found.
Thou comest indeed with rueful face
To fruitless hunters after place,
Blasting their hopes, but in exchange,
Presenting prospects of revenge.
Just so an egg when overdrest
Becomes confounded hard to digest;
And in the place of wholesome chyle,
Produces copious floods of bile.”—E.
[83] This satire was published in 1703, in small 4to. (66 pages) with this title, “Patriotism; a mock heroic, in five cantos.”
“Behold thy Gods O Israel.” (1 Kings.)
Cumberland says of this poem that “it is one of the keenest and wittiest satires extant in our language. Lord Temple, Wilkes, and others of the party were attacked with unsparing asperity, and much critical acumen. Churchill, the Dryden of the age, and indisputably a man of first-rate genius, was too candid not to acknowledge the merit of the poem; and when he declined taking up the gauntlet so pointedly thrown down to him, it was not because he held his challenger in contempt.” (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 212.) True as this may partially be, the poem has great defects. The poverty and incompleteness of the allegory are alone fatal to its interest; Pride, Faction, Folly and Ambition are made to perambulate the town, to carouse together, and reciprocate declamatory speeches without any adequate result,—these speeches indeed being the only object for which they are introduced. The total absence of incident is sought to be redeemed by descriptions, some of which are lively enough. Abuse of popular licence and eulogies of the King and his Ministers form the staple of the poem. It opens with an account of the visit of Pride to the Mansion House, and the hospitality of Beckford is rather ungratefully returned by the following (among other) spirited lines on his followers.
“To please the mob Byng stains the blushing deep,
And Blakeney[A] earns a Peerage in his sleep;
To please the mob our fleets their canvas strain,
And expeditions hide the wondering main.
The main more wondering wafts them back, alas!
Thinned with the wars of Rochfort and St. Cas.
What matter, since defeat our joy inspires,
And Cassel[B] lost can light a thousand fires?”
[A] He was said to have been confined to his bed during the defence of Minorca, for which he was so extravagantly rewarded.
[B] The gallant but unsuccessful affair of Cassel in which the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick was wounded.