From this time his journeyings to London became less and less frequent, and his life seems to have been passed for the most part in his native town in a calm round of social and domestic enjoyment, his playful fancy finding vent in squib and pasquinade, and in sparkling epigrams, an easy and unshackled style of versification for which he had a special aptitude. Not the least popular of his effusions was the one directed against the farmers or tenants of the Grammar School Mills, Messrs. Yates and Dawson, who had involved the town in the costs of a lawsuit because the inhabitants had refused to observe the old feudal monopoly and grind all their corn, grain, and malt at the mills:—
Here’s Bone and Skin,
Two millers thin,
Would starve the town, or near it,
But be it known
To Skin and Bone
That Flesh and Blood can’t bear it.
The point of the epigram was in the allusion to the professions of Yates and Dawson, Skin being Joseph Yates, a barrister, the father of Sir Joseph Yates, one of the Judges of the Common Pleas; and Bone, Dr. Dawson (Byrom’s relative), a well-known medical practitioner in the town, and the father of the ill-fated “Jemmy Dawson,” the hero of Shenstone’s pathetic ballad. He also, on the occasion of the Pretender’s visit to Manchester, wrote the lines which have since become almost as famous as his epigram on Handel and Bononcini:—
God bless the King! I mean the faith’s defender;
God bless (no harm in blessing) the Pretender;