"Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure
Nor useless all my vacant days have flowed,
From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime mature,
Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestowed."[17]
And, like Southey, he was not indisposed to enhance the dignity of the wreath by classing Chaucer and Spenser, as we have seen, among its wearers. The genuine claims of Warton to respect probably saved him from the customary attacks. Bating a few bungling thrusts amid the doggerel of "Peter Pindar," he escaped scathless,—gaining, on the other hand, a far more than ordinary proportion of poetical panegyric.
"Affection and applause alike he shared;
All loved the man, all venerate the bard:
E'en Prejudice his fate afflicted hears,
And lettered Envy sheds reluctant tears.
Such worth the laurel could alone repay,
Profaned by Cibber, and contemned by Gray;
Yet hence its Breath shall new distinction claim,
And, though it gave not, take from Warton fame."[18]
The last of Warton's odes was written in his last illness, and performed three days after his death. Appositely enough, it was an invocation to Health, meriting more than ordinary praise for eloquent fervor. Warton died May 21st, 1790. The laurel was vacant for a month, when Henry James Pye was gazetted. There was hardly a hungry placeman in London who had not as just pretensions to the honor. What poetical gifts he had displayed had been in school or college exercises. His real claims consisted in having spent a fortune in electioneering for ministers; and these claims being pressed with unusual urgency at the moment of Warton's death, he was offered the Laureateship as satisfaction in part.[19] He eagerly accepted it, and received the balance two years later in the shape of a commission as Police Magistrate of Middlesex. Thereafter, like Henry Fielding, or Gilbert A'Beckett, he divided his days between penal law and polite literature. His version of the "Poetics" of Aristotle, with illustrations drawn liberally from recent authors, was perhaps begotten of a natural wish to satisfy the public that qualifications for the laurel were not wholly wanting. A barren devotion to the drama was always his foible. It was freely indulged. With few exceptions, his plays were affairs of partnership with Samuel James Arnold, a writer of ephemeral popularity, whose tale of "The Haunted Island" was wildly admired by readers of the intensely romantic school, but whose tragedies, melodramas, comedies, farces, operas, are now forgotten. In addition to these auxiliary labors, which ripened yearly, Pye tried his hand at an epic,—the subject, King Alfred,—the plot and treatment not greatly differing from those which Blackmore brought to the same enterprise. The poem passed at once from the bookshop to the trunk-maker,—not, however, before an American publisher was found daring enough to reprint it. There are also to be mentioned translations from Pindar, Horace, and other classics, for Sharpe's edition of the British Poets, a collection to which he lent editorial aid. "Poet Pye"[20] was fortunate in escaping contemporary wit and satire. Gifford alluded to him, but Gifford's Toryism was security that no Tory Court-Poet would be roughly handled. Byron passed him in silence. The Smiths treated him as respectfully as they treated anybody. Moore's wit at the expense of the Regent and his courtiers had only found vent in the "Two-Penny Post-Bag" when Pye was gathered to his predecessors.
That calamity occurred in August, 1813. With it ended the era of birthday songs and New-Year's verses. The King was mad; his nativity was therefore hardly a rational topic of rejoicing. The Prince Regent had no taste for the solemn inanity of stipulated ode, the performance of which only served to render insufferably tedious the services of the two occasions in the year when imperative custom demanded his attendance at the Chapel. Consultation was had with John Wilson Croker, Secretary of the Admiralty. Croker's sharp common-sense at once suggested the abolition of the Laureate duties, but the retention of the office as a sinecure. Walter Scott, to whom the place was offered, as the most popular of living poets, seconded the counsel of Croker, but declined the appointment, as beneath the dignity of the intended founder of a long line of border knights. He recommended Southey. He had already recommended Southey to the "Quarterly," and through the "Quarterly" to Croker, then and still its most brilliant contributor; and this second instance of disinterested kindness was equally efficacious. Southey was appointed. The tierce of Canary ceased to be a perquisite of the office, the Laureate disclaiming it; and instead of annual odes upon set occasions, such effusions as the poet might choose to offer at the suggestion of passing events were to be accepted as the sum of official duty. These were to be said or read, not sung,—a change that completed the radical revolution of the office.
However important the salary of a hundred pounds may have been to Southey, it is very sure that the laurel seemed to infuse all its noxious and poisonous juices into his literary character. His vanity, like Whitehead's, led him to regard his chaplet as the reward of unrivalled merit. His study-chair was glorified, and became a throne. His supremacy in poetry was as indubitable as the king's supremacy in matters ecclesiastical. He felt himself constrained to eliminate utterly from his conscience whatever traces of early republicanism, pantisocracy, and heresy still disfigured it; and to conform unreservedly to the exactest requirements of high Toryism in politics and high Churchism in religion. He was in the pay and formed a part of the government; could he do else than toil mightily in his department for the service of a master who had so sagaciously anticipated the verdict of posterity, as to declare him, who was the least popular, the greatest of living poets? He found it a duty to assume a rigid censorship over as many of his Majesty's lieges as were addicted to verse,—to enact the functions of minister of literary police,—to reprehend the levity of Moore, the impiety of Byron, the democracy of Leigh Hunt, the unhappy lapse of Hazlitt, the drunkenness of Lamb. Assumptions so open to ridicule, and so disparaging to far abler men, told as disadvantageously upon his fame as upon his character. He became the butt of contemporary satire. Horace Smith, Moore, Shelley, Byron, lampooned him savagely. The latter made him the hero of his wicked "Vision of Judgment," and to him dedicated his "Don Juan." The dedication was suppressed; but no chance offered in the body of that profligate rhapsody to assail Bob Southey, that was not vigorously employed. The self-content of the Laureate armed him, however, against every thrust. Contempt he interpreted as envy of his sublime elevation:—
"Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!
In honor it was given; with honor it is worn."
Of course such matchless self-complacency defied assault.
Southey's congratulatory odes appeared as often as public occasion seemed to demand them. There were in rapid succession the "Ode to the Regent," the "Carmen Triumphale," the "Pilgrimage to Waterloo," the "Vision of Judgment," the "Carmen Nuptiale," the "Ode on the Death of the Princess Charlotte." The "Quarterly" exalted them, one and all; the "Edinburgh" poured upon them volleys of keen but ineffectual ridicule. At last the Laureate desisted. The odes no longer appeared; and during the long and dark closing years of his life, the only production of the Laureate pen was the yearly signature to a receipt for one hundred pounds sterling, official salary.
Robert Southey died in March, 1843. Sir Robert Peel, who had obliged Wordsworth the year before, by transferring the post in the excise, which he had so long held, to the poet's son, and substituting a pension for its salary, testified further his respect for the Bard of Rydal by tendering him the laurel. It was not to be refused. Had the office been hampered with any demands upon the occupant for popular lyric, in celebration of notable events, Wordsworth was certainly the last man to place in it. His frigid nature was incapable of that prompt enthusiasm, without which, poetry, especially poetry responsive to some strong emotion momentarily agitating the popular heart, is lifeless and worthless. Fortunately, there were no such exactions. The office had risen from its once low estate to be a dignified sinecure. As such, Wordsworth filled it; and, dying, left it without one poetical evidence of having worn the wreath.