The one is a Worcestershire worthy, Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, a caricaturist in verse of the times in which he lived. His chief character, giving name to the book by which he is best known, was suggested by Sir Samuel Luke, his puritan patron, whilst the book itself, commenced in 1663 and modelled after the Don Quixote of Cervantes, is in its faithful exposure of cant and hypocrisy scarcely inferior to its spirited Spanish prototype.
From a Painting by Opie.]
[Engraved by C. H. Hodges.
Dr. Wolcot (“Peter Pindar”).
The other distinguished person who found a resting-place so near him, also a satirist and an accomplished genius with many and varied gifts, was Dr. John Wolcot, a Devonian, born at Kingsbridge, or, more accurately, Dodbrooke, who is better known as Peter Pindar, whose lively writings were most popular in the time of the later Georges, and who then enjoyed a large measure of favour with society, whose questionable manners he so fearlessly portrayed, and for a while at least with the Court, every one of whom in turn, from the King and Prince Regent down to the royal kitchen maids and cooks, he mercilessly, cleverly, and continuously lampooned.
It is with this latter curious and cosmopolitan poet and satirist that we have to do. We shall be obliged to tread carefully as we follow the track of his life and his literature, for at the very outset we must remember that the times in which he lived were coarse and in many ways objectionable, and that he was, if not a product, at least a reflection of them.
We may wonder why he took upon himself the name of Pindar with the added apostolic difference—Peter. Was it done playfully or satirically, as was usual with him? Perhaps it was a joke at the expense of his neighbours, whose talk was so seldom on literature and art, but so often on oves et boves. Turning to the Biographia Classica, which he very possibly used, we read:—“Pindar, the first of the lyric poets born in Bœotia.... He quitted his native country, which was proverbial for the stupidity of its inhabitants, and went to Athens, where the greatest honours were bestowed upon him.... Such was the respect paid to his memory that when the Lacedemonians took Thebes, they spared his house, as also did Alexander the Great.” To this historical fact Wolcot frequently alluded, as, for instance, in the clever poem entitled—
AN ODE TO MY BARN.
By Lacedæmon men attack’d,