Laureate odes, good or bad, are always fair game for squibs. Whitehead had his share of ridicule, but he had more courage than Gray, who was so painfully afflicted by the parodies of Lloyd and Coleman, that he almost resolved to forswear poetry. Whitehead retorted on his assailants with easy good-humour, in "An Apology for all Laureates, past, present, and to come," beginning,
"Ye silly dogs, whose half-year lays
Attend, like satellites, on Bays,
And still with added lumber load
Each birth-day and each new-year ode,
Why will ye strive to be severe?
In pity to yourselves forbear;
Nor let the sneering public see
What numbers write far worse than he."
and ending,
"To Laureates is no pity due,
Encumber'd with a thousand clogs?
I'm very sure they pity you,
Ye silliest of silly dogs."
The next laureate, Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, is too well known and appreciated to require any lengthened notice here. In 1747 and 1748 he held the appointment of laureated poet, to which he was inaugurated, according to the ancient custom, in the common-room of Trinity College, Oxford. His duty was to celebrate a lady chosen as lady patroness, and Warton performed his task crowned with a wreath of laurel. In 1757, he was elected professor of poetry, as his father had formerly been in the same university. On the demise of Whitehead in 1785, the laureateship was conferred on him by command of George the Third. He was quizzed as his predecessor had been, and, like him, laughed at the jesters; and he gradually turned their scoffs to approbation by his equanimity and the merit of his performances. Warton had not only the wit to be diverted by probationary odes in mockery of his own, which he valued at less than they were worth, but he had temper to endure the malignant scurrility of Ritson, in reference to more important labours, with no severer remark than that he was a black-lettered dog. A portion of his later days was devoted to a labour of love—an edition of the juvenile poems of Milton, with copious notes. Though of sedentary college habits, and a free liver, he enjoyed vigorous health to the age of 62: he then broke down. He went to Bath with the gout, and returned, as he thought, in an improved condition. The evening of May 20, 1790, he passed cheerfully in the common-room, but, before midnight, he was stricken with paralysis, and the next day he was a corpse.
Henry James Pye, who was of a family of which the founder is stated to have come to England with the Conqueror, was likewise representative, by the female line, of the patriot Hampden. In 1784, he was returned to parliament as member for Berkshire. But the expense of the contest ruined him, and he was obliged to sell his estate; and even the slender salary of a laureate was not unacceptable when it fell in his way. Besides his official odes, he produced numerous works, epic, dramatic, and lyric, and also published several translations, and a corrected edition of Francis's Horace. The reader will be content if we pass all these with the remark that he was a respectable writer, a good London police-magistrate, and an honourable gentleman in a less equivocal sense than the parliamentary style. As factor of annual odes for the court, he was, of course, scurvily used by the wags. The joke on "Pindar, Pye, et parvus Pybus," was once in every body's mouth. He died in 1813, and was succeeded by
Robert Southey, who held the office for thirty years; and this prolonged tenure of it, still longer than Cibber's, by a man of unimpeachable worth and distinguished genius, is a happy set-off against the disgrace which frightened Gray, and made him refuse it. The concession proposed to Gray, that he should write only when and what he chose, was also virtually, though not formally, yielded to Southey. "The performance of the annual odes," he says, "had been suspended from the time of George the Third's illness in 1810, and fell completely into disuse. Thus terminated a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance." How is it that we have yet no biography of Southey? It is rumoured that his only surviving son, the Reverend Cuthbert Southey, has one in preparation. We hope that the report is true, and that it will contain abundance of his father's delightful letters, and be published soon. Bis dat qui cito dat,—that is, not that a book should be got up in a hurry, but that, after a delay of five years, the reasonable expectation of Robert Southey's admirers and regretters should be now promptly gratified.
We began with the earliest of laureates and the latest,—Apollo and the venerable Wordsworth,—and with them we will conclude. In a snug nook, sheltered from the north and east winds by Helvellyn, and Fairfield, Wordsworth has for many years cultivated his own laurels with success, till he is absolutely imbowered in them. The original slip, from which all this throng of greenery has sprung, is said to have been a cutting from a scion of the bay-tree planted by Petrarch at the tomb of Virgil, which tree was unquestionably derived from the undying root of that which supplied leaves for the garland of Apollo, and assuaged the divinity of his brow, when, as we reminded the reader at our outset on this ramble, he hired himself as poet-laureate to King Admetus, on a daily stipend of a hornful of milk.