Epistle from the Honourable Charles Fox, Partridge-Shooting, to the Honourable John Townshend, Cruising. London: Printed for R. Faulder, New Bond Street. M DCC LXXIX.
4to. P. [1], half-title, verso blank; p. [3], title, verso blank; pp. [5]-14, text; pp. [15-16], blank.
Copies: BM, HC. Sabin #95795.
A New Edition, Faulder, 1779. Third Edition, Faulder, 1780. Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1779. Reprinted in The New Foundling Hospital for Wit ... A New Edition ... In Six Volumes, J. Debrett, 1786, I, 318-323. Reprinted in Bell’s Classical Arrangement of Fugitive Poetry, British Library, 1789-94, IV, [86]-91.
The Epistle is a pleasing Horatian piece that makes good-natured fun of the Whig wits and politicians of Brooks’s Club. On John Townshend (1757-1833), later called Lord John, second son of the first Marquis Townshend, see W. P. Courtney, Eight Friends of the Great, 1910, pp. 172-183. Fox, in the country, is depicted urging on his pointers with “patriot names”:
No servile ministerial runners they!
Not Ranger then, but Washington, I cry;
Hey on! Paul Jones, re-echoes to the sky:
Toho! old Franklin—Silas Deane, take heed!—
Cheer’d with the sound, o’er hills and dales they speed.