Charles Churchill, 1731–1764. Born, in Westminster, Feb. 1731. Educated at Westminster School, 1739–49 (?). Made a “Fleet marriage” with Miss Scot, 1748. Entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1749, but did not take up residence. Ordained Curate to South Cadbury, Somersetshire, 1753. Ordained Priest, 1756; took curacy under his father at Rainham. Succeeded father at his death to curacy and lectureship of St. John’s Westminster. Added to small income by tuition. Separation from his wife, Feb. 1761. Contrib. to “The Library,” 1761. Resigned lectureship in consequence of protests of parishioners, Jan. 1763. Assisted Wilkes in editing “The North Briton,” 1762–63. Copious publication of satires and poems. At Oxford during Commemoration, 1763. Died, at Boulogne, 4 Nov. 1764. Buried in St. Martin’s Churchyard, Dover. Works: “The Rosciad” (anon.), 1761; “The Apology, addressed to the Critical Reviewers,” 1761; “Night” (anon.), 1761; “The Ghost,” bks. i., ii. (anon.), 1762; bk. iii., 1762; bk. iv., 1763; “The Prophecy of Famine,” 1763; “The Conference,” 1763; “An Epistle to W. Hogarth,” 1763; “The Author,” 1763; “Poems,” 1763; “Gotham,” 1764; “The Duellist,” 1764 (2nd edn. same year); “The Candidate,” 1764; “The Times” (anon.), 1764; “Independence” (anon.), 1764; “The Farewell” (anon.), 1764. Posthumous: “Sermons” (possibly by his father), 1765. Collected Works: in 4 vols., 1765; in 4 vols., 1774; in 2 vols., with life, 1804.

Personal

  No more he’ll sit in foremost row before the astonish’d pit; in brawn Oldmixon’s rival as in wit; and grin dislike, and kiss the spike; and giggle, and wriggle; and fiddle, and diddle; and fiddle-faddle, and diddle-daddle.

  Whenever I am happy in the acquaintance of a man of genius and letters, I never let any mean ill-grounded suspicions creep into my mind to disturb that happiness: whatever he says, I am inclined and bound to believe, and, therefore, I must desire you not to vex yourself with unnecessary delicacy upon my account. I see and read so much of Mr. Churchill’s spirit, without having the pleasure of his acquaintance, that I am persuaded that his genius disdains any direction, and that resolutions once taken by him will withstand the warmest importunities of his friends. At the first reading of his “Apology,” I was so charmed and raised with the power of his writing, that I really forgot that I was delighted when I ought to have been alarmed; this puts me in mind of the Highland officer, who was so warmed and elevated by the heat of the battle that he had forgot, till he was reminded by the smarting, that he had received no less than eleven wounds in different parts of his body.

	A bear, whom, from the moment he was born,
	His dam despised, and left unlick’d in scorn;
	A Babel, which, the power of Art outdone,
	She could not finish when she had begun;
	An utter Chaos, out of which no might,
	But that of God, could strike one spark of light.
	Broad were his shoulders, and from blade to blade
	A H—— might at full length have laid;
	Vast were his bones, his muscles twisted strong;
	His face was short, but broader than ’twas long;
	His features, though by Nature they were large,
	Contentment had contrived to overcharge,
	And bury meaning, save that we might spy
	Sense lowering on the penthouse of his eye;
	His arms were two twin oaks; his legs so stout
	That they might bear a Mansion-house about;
	Nor were they, look but at his body there,
	Design’d by Fate a much less weight to bear.
	O’er a brown cassock, which had once been black,
	Which hung in tatters on his brawny back,
	A sight most strange, and awkward to behold,
	He threw a covering of blue and gold.
	Just at that time of life, when man, by rule,
	The fop laid down, takes up the graver fool,
	He started up a fop, and, fond of show,
	Look’d like another Hercules turn’d beau.

  Churchill the poet is dead,—to the great joy of the Ministry and the Scotch, and to the grief of very few indeed, I believe; for such a friend is not only a dangerous but a ticklish possession…. Churchill had great powers; but, besides the facility of outrageous satire, almost all his compositions were wild and extravagant, executed on no plan, and void of the least correction.

  Your Lordship knows that … owed the greatest share of his renown to the most incompetent of all judges, the mob; actuated by the most unworthy of all principles, a spirit of insolence; and inflamed by the vilest of all human passions, hatred to their fellow citizens. Those who joined the cry in his favour seemed to me to be swayed rather by fashion than by real sentiment. He therefore might have lived and died unmolested by me; confident as I am, that posterity, when the present unhappy dissensions are forgotten, will do ample justice to his real character. But when I saw the extravagant honours that were paid to his memory, and heard that a monument in Westminster Abbey was intended for one, whom even his admirers acknowledge to have been an incendiary and a debauchee, I could not help wishing that my countrymen would reflect a little on what they were doing, before they consecrated, by what posterity would think the public voice, a character which no friend to virtue or to true taste can approve.

  Had he not been himself so severe a censor, his private irregularities would have been softened down to the eccentricities of genius, and his midnight parties would have been dignified with the amiable attributes of social enjoyment, “the feast of reason and the flow of soul;” instead of which, they were blazoned abroad as the orgies of brutal intemperance, and the scenes of vulgar and depraved gratification.

	I stood beside the grave of him who blazed
	The comet of a season, and I saw
	The humblest of all sepulchres, and gazed
	With not the less of sorrow and of awe
	On that neglected turf and quiet stone,
	With name no clearer than the names unknown,
	Which lay unread around it.

  The unexpected death of a man in the flower of his age, who during four years had been one of the most conspicuous persons in England, and certainly the most popular poet, occasioned a strong feeling among the part of the public to whose political prepossessions and passions he had addressed himself. Some of his admirers were inconsiderate enough to talk of erecting a monument to him in Westminster Abbey; but if permission had been asked it must necessarily have been refused; it would indeed have been not less indecent to grant, than to solicit such an honour for a clergyman who had thrown off his gown, and renounced, as there appeared too much reason to apprehend, his hope in Christ. His associates undoubtedly wished to have it believed that he had shown as little regard to religion in the last hours, as in the latter years of his life; and though they obtained Christian burial for him, by bringing the body from Boulogne to Dover, where it was interred in the old cemetery which once belonged to the collegiate church of St. Martin, they inscribed upon his tombstone, instead of any consolatory or monitory text, this epicurean line from one of his own poems,

Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.

Wilkes erected a monument to his friend’s memory, in the grounds of his cottage at Sandham, in the Isle of Wight. It was a broken pillar, fluted, and of the Doric order, nine feet high, five feet in diameter, placed in a grove, with weeping willows, cypresses, and yews behind, laurels beside it, and bays, myrtles, and other shrubs in the foreground. A tablet, on the pillar, bore this inscription:

	CAROLO CHURCHILL,
	AMICO JUCUNDO,
	POETÆ ACRI,
	CIVI OPTIME DE PARTRIA MERITO
	P.
	JOHANNES WILKES.
	M DCC LXV.

The same words he inscribed upon a sepulchral alabaster urn, sent him from Rome by the Abbe Winckelman, who was then the superintendent of the antiquities in that city.

  Pope had a tall Irishman to attend him when he published the “Dunciad,” but Churchill was tall enough to attend himself. One of Pope’s victims, by way of delicate reminder, hung up a birch rod at Button’s; but Churchill’s victims might see their satirist any day walking Covent-Garden unconcernedly, provided with a bludgeon by himself…. The restraint he had so long submitted to, once thrown aside, and the compromise ended, he thought he could not too plainly exhibit, his new existence to the world. He had declared war against hypocrisy in all stations, and in his own would set it no example. The pulpit had starved him on forty pounds a-year; the public had given him a thousand pounds in two months; and he proclaimed himself, with little regard to the decencies in doing it, better satisfied with the last service than the first. This was carrying a hatred of hypocrisy beyond the verge of prudence; indulging it indeed, with the satire it found vent in, to the very borders of licentiousness. He stripped off his clerical dress by way of parting with his last disguise, and appeared in a blue coat with metal buttons, a gold-laced waistcoat, a gold-laced hat, and ruffles.

  Possessed of powers and natural endowments which might have made him, under favourable circumstances, a poet, a hero, a man, and a saint, he became, partly through his own fault, and partly through the force of destiny, a satirist, an unfortunate politician, a profligate, died early; and we must approach his corpse, as men do those of Burns and Byron, with sorrow, wonder, admiration, and blame, blended into one strange, complex, and yet not unnatural emotion. Like them, his life was short and unhappy—his career triumphant, yet checquered—his powers uncultivated—his passions unchecked—his poetry only a partial discovery of his genius—his end sudden and melancholy—and his reputation, and future place in the history of letters, hitherto somewhat uncertain. And yet, like them, his very faults and errors, both as a man and a poet, have acted, with many, as nails, fastening to a “sure place” his reputation and the effect of his genius…. For the errors of Churchill, as a man, there does not seem to exist any plea of palliation, except what may be found in the poverty of his early circumstances, and in the strength of his later passions. The worst is, that he never seems to have been seduced into sin through the bewildering and bewitching mist of imagination. It was naked sensuality that he appeared to worship, and he always sinned with his eyes open. Yet his moral sense, though blunted, was never obliterated; and many traits of generosity and good feeling mingled with his excesses.

  The details of his life and conversation perished with his contemporaries; and at this moment we know him less familiarly than almost any man of equal celebrity in his whole century…. We need only say that his person had the rough vigour of his mind. There were incidents in his life which cannot be defended, and which he did not attempt to defend. His passions were strong, and his morals too often loose. But if there was much to blame in Churchill, there was also a great deal to admire and respect. He was an honest man, a brave man, and a generous man; and many far inferior characters, with less excuse from circumstances, have gone through life in the enjoyment of perfectly respectable reputations.

  After Hogarth had made a caricature of Wilkes with his squint, Churchill wrote a savage “Epistle to William Hogarth,” who, in return, impaled him with almost the only fame he now has: he represented Churchill as a bear in torn clerical bands, and paws in ruffles, holding a pot of porter in one hand, and a club, inscribed with “Lyes” and “North Briton,” in the other, and a pug-dog using his poems as a bone. Beneath was written: “The Bruiser C. Churchill (once the Rev.), in the character of a Russian Hercules, regaling himself after having killed the monster Caricature, that so sorely galled his virtuous friend, the heaven-born Wilkes.”

  Churchill had been a clergyman “through need, not choice” (Dedication to Sermons). Conscientious biographers alone have read the published sermons attributed to him, and they pronounce them to be unreadable. Churchill himself says that “sleep at his bidding, crept from pew to pew.” His first biographers say that he discharged his duties well, which probably means that he had as yet caused no scandal. His marriage was now coming to the usual end of such alliances. His wife was as “imprudent” as himself, if nothing worse; and in February 1761 a formal separation took place. Churchill’s references to her imply that he was heartily tired of her.

General

  He talked very contemptuously of Churchill’s poetry, observing, that “it had a temporary currency, only from its audacity of abuse, and being filled with living names, and that it would sink into oblivion.” I ventured to hint that he was not quite a fair judge, as Churchill had attacked him violently. Johnson. “Nay, Sir, I am a very fair judge. He did not attack me violently until he found I did not like his poetry; and his attack on me shall not prevent me from continuing to say what I think of him, from an apprehension that it may be ascribed to resentment. No, Sir, I called the fellow a blockhead at first, and I will call him a blockhead still. However, I will acknowledge that I have a better opinion of him now, than I once had; for he has shewn more fertility than I expected. To be sure, he is a tree that cannot produce good fruit: he only bears crabs. But, Sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better than a tree which produces only a few.”

  The loss of Churchill I shall always reckon the most cruel of all afflictions I have suffered. I will soon convince mankind that I knew how to value such superior genius and merit. I have more than half finished the projected edition of Churchill, and my thoughts now turn towards printing it, which I find cannot be done here.

  He was a great admirer of Dryden, in preference to Pope; and indeed the quick turns of thought, strength of expression, with the variety of versification in his own works, are no mean proofs that he studied and copied Dryden’s manner. He held Pope so cheap, that one of his most intimate friends assured me, that he had some thoughts of attacking his poetry; and another gentleman informed me, that in a convivial hour he wished the bard of Twickenham was alive, that he might have an opportunity to make him bring forth all his art of poetry, for he would certainly have a struggle with him for pre-eminence. Of Churchill we may say without hesitation, that he was a man of genius, and of a temper firm and undaunted; often led away by pleasure, but at times strenuously active. His thoughts issued from him with ease, rapidity, and vigour.

	Surly and slovenly, and bold and coarse,
	Too proud for art, and trusting in mere force,
	Spendthrift alike of money and of wit,
	Always at speed, and never drawing bit,
	He struck the lyre in such a careless mood,
	And so disdain’d the rules he understood,
	The laurel seem’d to wait on his command;
	He snatch’d it rudely from the Muses’ hand.

  I have read him twice, and some of his pieces three times over, and the last time with more pleasure than the first…. He is indeed a careless writer for the most part; but where shall we find in any of those authors who finish their works with the exactness of a Flemish pencil, those bold and daring strokes of fancy, those numbers so hazardously ventured upon and so happily finished, the matter so compressed and yet so clear, and the colouring so sparingly laid on, and yet with such a beautiful effect? In short, it is not his least praise, that he is never guilty of those faults as a writer which he lays to the charge of others. A proof that he did not judge by a borrowed standard, or from rules laid down by critics, but that he was qualified to do it by his own native powers, and his great superiority of genius. For he that wrote so much, and so fast would, through inadvertence hurry unavoidably, have departed from rules which he might have founded in books, but his own truly poetical talent was a guide which could not suffer him to err.

  Blotting and correcting was so much Churchill’s abhorrence, that I have heard from his publisher he once energetically expressed himself, that it was like cutting away one’s own flesh. This strong figure sufficiently shows his repugnance to an author’s duty. Churchill now lies neglected, for posterity will only respect those who

	“———File off the mortal part
	Of glowing thought with Attic art.”
	Young.

I have heard that this careless bard, after a successful work, usually precipitated the publication of another, relying on its crudeness being passed over by the public curiosity excited by its better brother. He called this getting double pay, for thus he secured the sale of a hurried work. But Churchill was a spendthrift of fame, and enjoyed all his revenue while he lived; posterity owes him little, and pays him nothing!

  A certain simplicity of style—and easy unaffected English—which disclaims the correction of minute blemishes, immingles much of the idiomatic dialect of conversation—which avoids the set of phrases and dancing master steps of practised versifiers—these constitute Churchill’s highest merit, and confer on his writings the atticism which preserves them.

  The powers of Churchill have been unable to protect him from the oblivion into which his poems are daily sinking, owing to the ephemeral interest of political subjects, and his indolent negligence of severe study and regularity.

  Churchill’s Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subjects deserved: they are strong, coarse, and full of an air of hardened assurance.

  Churchill may be ranked as a satirist immediately after Pope and Dryden, with perhaps a greater share of humour than either. He has the bitterness of Pope, with less wit to atone for it; but no mean share of the free manner and energetic plainness of Dryden.

  That many of the objects of Churchill’s satire were morally and politically obnoxious to it, few will have the hardihood to deny. That some of them were too severely treated, we may admit; but where is the proof that Churchill did not, however erroneously, imagine that he was justified in the language which he used? Who is there that believes the stupidity and worthlessness of every individual who suffered under the lash of Dryden and Pope; yet who ever thought that Dryden and Pope ought to be accused of wilful falsehood? With respect to Churchill, there is this powerful fact on his side, that bribes and preferments were vainly offered to purchase his silence; and he who resists such inducements is not likely to be a man who has “little veneration for truth!” He may be a mistaken fanatic, but he must be an honest one.

  Of him it was said by one greater far, that he “blazed the meteor of a season.” For four years—during life—his popularity—in London and the suburbs—was prodigious; for forty—and that is a long time after death—he was a choice classic in the libraries of aging or aged men of wit upon town; and now, that nearly a century has elapsed since he “from his horrid hair shook pestilence and war” o’er slaves and Scotsmen, tools and tyrants, peers, poetasters, priests, pimps, and players, his name is still something more than a mere dissyllable, and seems the shadow of the sound that Mother dullness was wont to whisper in her children’s ears when fretting wakefully on her neglected breasts…. There is an air of power in his way of attacking any and every subject. He goes to work without embarrassment, with spirit and ease, and is presently in his matter, or in some matter, rarely inane. It is a part, and a high part of genius, to design; but he was destitute of invention. The self-dubbed champion of liberty and letters, he labours ostentatiously and energetically in that vocation; and in the midst of tumultuous applause, ringing round a career of almost uninterrupted success, he seldom or never seems aware that the duties he had engaged himself to perform—to his country and his kind—were far beyond his endowments—above his conception. His knowledge either of books or men was narrow and superficial. In no sense had he ever been a student. His best thoughts are all essentially common-place; but, in uttering them, there is almost always a determined plainness of words, a free step in verse, a certain boldness and skill in evading the trammel of the rhyme, deserving high praise; while often, as if spurning the style which yet does not desert him, he wears it clinging about him with a sort of disregarded grace.

  It is not by the indifferent qualities in his works that Charles Churchill should be, as he has too frequently been, condemned. Judge him at his best; judge him by the men he followed in this kind of composition; and his claim to the respectful and enduring attention of the students of English poetry and literature, becomes manifest indeed. Of the gross indecencies of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, he has none. He never, in any one instance, that he might fawn upon power or trample upon weakness, wrote licentious lampoons. There was not a form of mean pretence, or servile assumption, which he did not denounce. Low, pimping politics, he abhorred: and that their vile abettors, to whose exposure his works are so incessantly devoted, have not carried him into utter oblivion with themselves, sufficiently argues for the sound morality and permanent truth expressed in his manly verse. He indulged too much in personal invective, as we have said; and invective is too apt to pick up, for instant use against its adversaries, the first heavy stone that lies by the wayside, without regard to its form or fitness.

  Churchill’s opinions are worth attending to, though he expresses them with vehemence, and by wholesale.

	Churchill, by want and rage impell’d to write,
	Whose muse was anger, and whose genius spite,
	With satire meant to stab, and not to heal,
	The morbid, bloated, feverish commonweal;
	Too proud to yield to humble virtue’s rule,
	Smote half the world with reckless ridicule.
	Wit, honour, sense, to him did Heaven impart,
	But not the last, best gift, a pious heart.
	He blazed awhile in fortune, fame, and pride,
	But unrespected lived, untimely died.

  Perhaps the writer who, if not by what he did himself, yet by the effects of his example, gave the greatest impulse to our poetry at this time, was Churchill…. If we put aside Thomson, Churchill, after all deductions, may be pronounced, looking to the quantity as well as the quality of his productions, to be the most considerable figure that appears in our poetry in the half-century from Pope to Cowper. But that is, perhaps, rather to say little for the said half-century than much for Churchill.

  Was of the blood of the Juvenals and Drydens, though a poor relation as it were; and with all his carelessness, roughness, and even common-place, has those brilliant flashes of insight, and spontaneous felicities of expression, by which every true critic at once distinguishes the man of natural power from the man of mere cultivation. He rarely gives perfect satisfaction to the student, and never long-continued satisfaction; but the kind of pleasure he gives in his best moments is akin to that given by the greatest writers of his kind. There are some who, with less dross, turn out worse metal. Churchill is frequently dull, but never mediocre; and if he is wearisome in one paragraph, is as likely as not to make up for it by being wonderful in the next. All satirists, it has been said, take with more or less directness either after Horace or Juvenal. Churchill is a Juvenalian; a suckling of the Roman wolf; fierce but jolly; savage yet not unkindly. Of course, too, he has points in common with all the great satirists, for they have the distant likenesses of a clan as well as the nearer likenesses of a family. He has the Aristophanic heartiness, though not the Aristophanic poetry; the good-fellowship of Horace, with far less subtlety and familiar grace; a good deal of Dryden’s vigour and eye for the points of a satirical portrait, but inferior penetration of glance, and far less comprehensive sweep, whether of reasoning power, poetic humour, or fancy.

  He had a surprising extemporary vigour of mind; his praise carries great weight of blow; he undoubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as Cowper says of him, in a certain rude and earth-born vigor; but his verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course, in the Chalmers columbarium, and without danger of violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a good life on the books of the Critical Insurance Office. “It is not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by the side of Virgil?” cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wit’s end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be also the great Mantuan’s art, his power, not only of being strong in parts, but of making these parts coherent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it.

  Churchill was a man of much generous impulse; and the reader can still enjoy the vigour of many passages in his poems, although their absolute subject-matter, combined with their length, is a bar to general perusal now-a-days.

  Churchill was inspired by both the motives which, according to the two great Latin satirists, are the parents of satire; but his indignation did not burn with the pure flame of Juvenal, and his impecuniosity, unlike the honorable poverty of Horace, was the child of his vices. Writing to live, he did not write so that his works should live after him. Dashing off a poem a month, in order to catch a perennial stream of half-crowns from his eager and insatiable readers, he vehemently declared that to blot, prune, or correct was like the cutting-away of his own flesh.

	“Little of books, and little known of men,
	When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen;
	Rough as they run, the ready thoughts set down;
	Rough as they run, discharge them on the town.”

With his quiver of darts so unpolished that they could not escape the rust, tipped with venom that long ago had lost its sting, Churchill, “the scourge of bad men, and hardly better than the very worst,” easily and rapidly stormed in his lifetime the citadel of Fame, but he was not of those whose names are engraved upon its bulwarks.

  The celebrity of the smart verse making of Churchill marks a low point in English taste. It nearly secured him a poet’s monument in Westminster Abbey; and it actually secured a poet’s rank for a petulant rhymer without a spark of the poet’s imagination, of cold heart, natural bad taste, and very little knowledge of that narrow world which he so impudently lampooned. Nothing in Churchill reveals a gleam of genial feeling, or justifies the suspicion that he could take any pleasure in what refines or elevates. If we may believe his own account of himself, nature had given him little enough, beyond an ugly face, a sour temperament and a bitter tongue. Yet he was not dissatisfied. He was very willing to be taken for what he was: and if he could not win liking and respect, he was content to be feared. In all this there must have been something of affectation. Yet it is only too clear that the coarse texture of his mind was impermeable to the kindlier and worthier influences of his time…. Cowper, we know, had a real admiration for him. His earliest work the “Rosciad,” is his best, because in it he most adhered to good models. His later works will serve the student as a rich mine of all sorts of errors in taste and judgment. In proportion as he abandoned himself to his own guidance, his work degenerated, and the poverty of his thought appeared; and in three years he had literally written himself out. But in all that he wrote there is a certain fierce manliness which wins attention, and even sympathy for his untutored brain and unsoftened heart, and this effect is heightened by the story of his life and death.

  The satirist who towered for a moment so high above his contemporaries, and who leaves upon us the same impression of greatness as a knock-kneed giant at a country fair may leave. The Rev. Charles Churchill (1731–1764) has faded to the merest shadow of himself, and the writer who of all others aimed at being virile, robust, and weighty, has come to be regarded as the ideal of a pasteboard hero…. Feared and admired for his force, with his tempest of uncouth and vituperative verse, his rattling facility, and his reckless swaggering courage to support him, Churchill exercised a genuine power so long as he lasted, and to some of his contemporaries he appeared another Dryden. But he was really scarcely an Oldham. His work is crude and unfinished to excess, he has no ear and no heart, and he fails to please us the moment that our surprise at his violence is over. His latest works are positively execrable, whether in morals or in style, and he alternates in them between the universal attribution of hypocrisy to others, and the cynical confession of vice in himself. He is a very Caligula among men of letters; when he stings his Muse to the murder of a reputation, he seems to cry “Ita feri, ut se mori sentiat.” The happiness of others is a calamity to him; and his work would excite in us the extremity of aversion, if it were not that its very violence betrays the exasperation and wretchedness of its unfortunate author. Even more than Goldsmith, Churchill exemplifies the resolute return to the forms of poetic art in vogue before the age of Thomson and Gray.

  The trifling subject and the venomous personalities of “The Rosciad” cannot hide its vigour, the occasional acuteness of its criticisms, and above all the return, in the management of the couplet, from the exquisite but rather shrilling treble of Pope to the manly range of Dryden.