Tate had been known as a hanger-on at the court of Charles, and as a feeble versifier and pamphleteer of the Tory school, before an alliance with Dryden gave him a certain degree of importance. The first part of "Absalom and Achitophel," in 1681, convulsed the town and angered the city. Men talked for a time of nothing else. Tate, who was in the secret of its authorship, talked of it to Dryden, and urged an extension of the poem. Were there not enough of Shaftesbury's brisk boys running at large who deserved to be gibbeted? Were there not enough Hebrew names in the two books of Samuel to name each as appropriately as those already nomenclatured? But Dryden was indisposed to undertake a continuation which must fall short of what had been executed in the exact proportion that the characters left for it were of minor consequence. He recommended the task to Tate. Tate, flattered and nothing loath, accordingly sent to the press the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel," embodying a contribution from Dryden of two hundred lines, which are as plainly distinguishable from the rest as a patch of cloth of gold upon cloth of frieze. The credit of this first alliance proved so grateful to Nahum, that he never after ventured upon literary enterprise without the aid of a similar coalition. His genius was inherently parasitic. In conjunction with Tory and Jesuit, he coalesced in the celebration of Castlemaine's gaudy reception at Rome.
In conjunction with Nicholas Brady, he prepared that version of the Psalms still appended to the English Book of Common Prayer. In conjunction with Dryden and others, he translated Juvenal. In conjunction with Lord Dorset, he edited a praiseworthy edition of the poems of Sir John Davies, which might otherwise have been lost or forgotten. In conjunction with Garth, he translated the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid. And in conjunction with Dr. Blow, he prepared those Pindaric flights which set King William asleep, and made Godolphin ashamed that the deeds of Marlborough should be so unworthily sung.
So long as he continued to enjoy the patronage of his liberal Maecenas, Tate, with his aid, and these labors, and the income of his office, contrived to maintain the state of a gentleman. But Dorset died in 1706; the Laureate's dull heroics found no vent; and ere the death of Queen Anne,—an event which he bewailed in the least contemptible of his odes,—his revenues were contracted to the official stipend. The accession of the house of Hanover, in 1714, was the downfall of Toryism; and Tate was a Tory. His ruin was complete. The Elector spared not the house of Pindar. The Laureate was stripped of the wreath; his only income confiscated; and after struggling feebly with fate in the form of implacable creditors, he took refuge in the Old Mint, the resort of thieves and debtors, where in 1715 he died,—it is said, of starvation. Alas, that the common lot of Grub Street should have precedent in the person of laurelled royalty itself!
The coronation of Laureate Rowe was simultaneous with that of George I. His immediate claim to the honor dated back to the year 1702, when his play of "Tamerlane" had caught the popular fancy, and proved of vast service to the ministry at a critical moment in stimulating the national antipathy to France. The effect was certainly not due to artistic nicety or refinement. King William, as Tamerlane, was invested with all virtues conceivable of a Tartar conqueror, united with the graces of a primitive saint; while King Louis, as Bajazet, fell little short of the perfections of Satan. These coarse daubs, executed in the broadest style of the sign-post school of Art, so gratified the mob, that for half a century their exhibition was called for on the night of November the fifth. Rowe, moreover, belonged to the straitest sect of Whiggery,—was so bigoted, indeed, as to decline the acquaintance of a Tory, and in play and prologue missed no chance of testifying devotion to liberal opinions.[5] His investiture with the laurel was only another proof that at moments of revolution extremists first rise to the surface. A man of affluent fortune, and the recipient of redundant favors from the new ministry, Rowe enjoyed the sunshine of life, while the dethroned Nahum starved in the Mint, as the dethroned James starved at Rome. Had the dramatic tribute still been exacted, there is little doubt that the author of the "Fair Penitent," and of "Jane Shore," would have lent splendid lustre to his office. His odes, however,—such, at least, as have been thought worthy of preservation among his works,—are a prodigious improvement upon the tenuity of his predecessor, and immeasurably superior in poetical fire and elegance to those of any successor antecedent to Warton.
For, following Nicholas Rowe, there were dark ages of Laureate dulness,—a period redeemed by nothing, unless by the ridicule and controversy to which the wearers of the leaf gave occasion. Rowe died in the last days of 1718. The contest for the vacant place is presumed to have been unusually active. John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, imitating Suckling's "Session of the Poets," brings all the versifiers of the time into the canvas, and after humorously dispatching one after another, not sparing himself, closes,—
"At last, in rushed Eusden, and cried, 'Who shall have it,
But I, the true Laureate, to whom the King gave it?'
Apollo begged pardon, and granted his claim,
But vowed, though, till then, he ne'er heard of his name."[6]
This Laurence Eusden was a scribbling parson, whose model in Art was Sir Richard Blackmore, and whose morality was of the Puritanical stripe. He had assisted Garth in his Ovid, assuming, doubtless upon high moral grounds, the rendering of the impurest fables. He had written odes to great people upon occasions more or less great, therein exhibiting some ingenuity in varying the ordinary staple of adulation. He had addressed an epithalamium to the Duke of Newcastle upon his marriage with the Lady Henrietta Godolphin,—a tribute so gratifying to his Grace, then Lord Chamberlain, as to secure the poet the place of Rowe. Eusden's was doubtless the least honorable name as yet associated with the laurel. His contemporaries allude to him with uniform disdain. Cooke, the translator of Hesiod, tells us,—
"Eusden, a laurelled bard, by fortune raised,
By very few was read, by fewer praised,"
Pope, as cavalierly, in the "Dunciad":—
"She saw old Prynne in restless Daniel shine,
And Eusden eke out Blackmore's endless line."