The odes of Pindar the Great have survived and are to be admired “for sublimity of sentiment, grandeur of expression, energy and magnificence of style, boldness of metaphors, harmony of numbers, and elegance of diction.” According to Horace he was inimitable, and all succeeding writers have agreed in extolling his genius.
Peter Pindar also called his favourite productions odes. We have them before us in bulky quartos as originally published, and in numerous volumes of pocket size as collected in 1816 by Walker. They were written in Cornwall, Devon, the West Indies, Bath and London, and covered a very wide range of subjects. He approached the realm of poetry as George Morland did that of pictorial art, refusing no subject on account of its coarseness, and yet with his fidelity of treatment in describing both rustic and town life, has often shown a fine appreciation of truth and of the beautiful.
Like George Morland he was spoiled by moral laxity, and like him always gives us a sad impression of what he might have been and might have done, if his clever genius had been kept within bounds by moral restraint. But, alas! even as an old man, he retained a taste for the follies which corrupted his youth, and continued to reflect too faithfully the spirit of those immoral days when the scandalous manners of the court were injurious alike to the Church and the State. It would have been better for him to have taken the advice he gives in one of his odes:—
Build not, alas! your popularity
On that beast’s back ycleped Vulgarity,
A beast that many a booby takes a pride in,
A beast beneath the noble Peter’s riding.
. . . . . .
Envy not such as have surpast ye,
’Tis very, very easy to be nasty.