When thou, poor mortal, shalt like him be clay.
Through life he walk’d unemulous of fame,
Nor wish’d beyond it to preserve a name.
Content, if Friendship, o’er his humble bier,
Drop but the heartfelt tribute of a tear;
Though countless ages should unconscious glide,
Nor learn that ever he had liv’d, or died.
“R. F.”
Such is the epitaph placed on a stone sarcophagus in the usual form, in the churchyard at Sunninghill, close to the house where Gen. Fitzpatrick’s friend, G. Ellis, died.—Nichols, Lit. Illustr., vol. vii., pp. 633–4.—Ed.]
[51]. Line 19.—[Lord John Townshend, the second son of the first Marquis Townshend. He represented Cambridge till ousted by Pitt at the general election in 1784. In 1788 he became the colleague of Fox for Westminster. He afterwards represented Knaresborough for twenty-five years: his colleague in 1797 was Hare. He had great powers of wit and satire. In the Political Eclogues (subjoined to The Rolliad), he wrote the one entitled “Jekyll”. To the Probationary Odes for the Laureatship he contributed No. xii., in ridicule of Warren Hastings’s agent, Major John Scott, M.P. Also, the “Dialogue between a certain personage and his Minister,” in imitation of the Ninth Ode of Horace, Book III.—Ed.]