And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends!"[324]
"The worst inn's worst room," however, is a poetical fiction. Buckingham died at the house of one of his tenants at Kirby Mallory, where he was overtaken with illness. He had wasted his fortune to a comparative nothing; but was not reduced to such necessity as the poet would imply.[325]
Andrew Marvel makes the statue of Charing Cross the speaker in one of his witty libels on Charles and his brother. There was an equestrian statue of Charles II. at Woolchurch, the horse of which is made to hold a dialogue with this other. The poet fancies that the riders, "weary of sitting all day," stole off one evening, and the two horses came together. The readers at Will's must have been a little astonished at the boldness of such passages as the following:—
"Quoth the marble horse, It would make a stone speak,
To see a Lord Mayor and a Lombard Street beak,
Thy founder and mine, to cheat one another,
When both knaves agreed to be each other's brother.
Here Charing broke forth, and thus he went on—
My brass is provoked as much as thy stone
To see church and state bow down to a ——