Laurence Eusden, "a parson much bemused in beer," stumbled into his place, just in time to elaborate, singultu laborare, the Coronation Ode for George the Second. A specimen or two of his loyal suspirations may be as welcome as a hundred.
"Hail, mighty Monarch! whose desert alone
Would, without birthright, raise thee to a throne!
Thy virtues shine peculiarly nice.
Ungloom'd with a confinity to vice."
Lord Hervey's "Memoirs of the Court of George the Second," recently made public, are an edifying exposition of the "peculiarly nice" virtues here extolled.
"What strains shall equal to thy glories rise,
First to the world, and borderer on the skies?"
The conjuror who can make out the meaning of the last line may be able to answer the question. In his joy for a George the Second, the inspired bard dries up his tears for George the First:—
"How exquisitely great! who canst inspire
Such joy that Albion mourns no more thy sire!
A dull, fat, thoughtless heir unheeded springs
From a long slothful line of restive kings:
But when a stem, with fruitful branches crown'd,
Has flourish'd, in each various branch renown'd,
His great forerunners when the last outshone,
Who could a brighter hope, or even as bright a son?"
He ends with a kick at the Stuarts:
"Avaunt, degenerate grafts, or spurious breed!
'Tis a George only can a George succeed."
If Charles Edward had known that, he might have saved himself a good deal of trouble.
Eusden died at his rectory in Lincolnshire in 1730. Colley Cibber wore the laurel with unblushing front for twenty-seven years from that date. His annual birth-day and new-year odes for all that time are treasured in the Gentleman's Magazine. They are all so bad, that his friends pretended that he made them so on purpose. Dr Johnson, however, often asserted, from his personal knowledge of the man, that he took great pains with his lyrics, and thought them far superior to Pindar's. The Doctor was especially merry with one ultra-Pindaric flight which occurs in the Cibberian "Ode for the New-Year 1750."