Born, at Dodbrooke, Devonshire, 1738; baptized, 9 May. Educated at Kingsbridge Free School; at Bodmin Grammar School, and in France. For seven years assistant to his uncle, an apothecary in practice in Cornwall. M.D., Aberdeen, 1767. In Jamaica, practising as surgeon and physician, 1767–69. Returned to England, 1769. Ordained Deacon and Priest, 1769; returned to Jamaica. Vicar of Vere, Jamaica, 1772. Returned to England, Dec. 1772. Practised medicine in Truro, 1773–79. Settled in London, 1781. Prolific writer of satires, under pseudonym “Peter Pindar.” Died, in London, 14 Jan. 1819. Buried in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Works: “Persian Love Elegies,” 1773; [the following all pubd. under pseud. “Peter Pindar:”] “A Poetical … Epistle to the Reviewers,” 1778; “Poems on various Subjects,” 1778; “Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians,” 1782; “Lyric Odes for the Year,” 1785; “The Louisad,” 1785–95; “Farewell Odes,” 1786; “A Poetical and Congratulatory Epistle to James Boswell,” 1786; “Bozzy and Piozzi,” 1786; “Ode upon Ode,” 1787; “An Apologetic Postscript to ‘Ode upon Ode,’” 1787; “Congratulatory Epistle to Peter Pindar,” 1787; “Instructions to a Celebrated Laureat,” 1787; “Brother Peter to Brother Tom,” 1788; “Peter’s Pension,” 1788; “Sir Joseph Banks and the Emperor of Morocco,” 1788; “Epistle to his pretended Cousin Peter,” 1788; “The King’s Ode” (anon.), 1788; “Peter’s Prophecy,” 1788; “Lyric Odes to the Academicians,” 1789; “Subjects for Painters,” 1789; “A Poetical Epistle to a Falling Minister,” 1789; “Expostulated Odes,” 1789; “Works” (2 vols.), 1789–92; “A Benevolent Epistle to Sylvanus Urban,” 1790; “Advice to the Future Laureat,” 1790; “Letter to the Most Insolent Man alive,” 1790; “Complimentary Epistle to James Bruce,” 1790; “The Rights of Kings,” 1791; “Odes to Mr. Paine,” 1791; “The Remonstrance,” 1791; “A Commiserating Epistle to G. Lowther,” 1791; “More Money,” 1792; “The Tears of St. Margaret,” 1792; “Odes of Importance,” 1792; “Odes to Kien Long,” 1792; “A Pair of Lyric Epistles,” 1792; “A Poetical … Epistle to the Pope,” 1793; “Pathetic Odes,” 1794; “Pindariana,” 1794; “Celebration; or, the Academic Procession to St. James’s,” 1794; “Works” (4 vols.), 1794–96; “Hair-Powder,” 1795; “The Convention Bill,” 1795; “The Cap,” 1795; “The Royal Visit to Exeter,” 1795; “Liberty’s Last Squeak,” 1795; “The Royal Tom,” 1795; “An Admirable Satire on Burke’s Defence of his Pension,” 1796; “One Thousand, Seven Hundred, and Ninety-six,” 1797; “An Ode to the Livery of London,” 1797; “Tales of the Hoy” [1798]; “Nil Admirari,” 1799; “Lord Auckland’s Triumph,” 1800; “Out at Last,” 1801; “Odes to Inns and Outs,” 1801; “A Poetical Epistle to Benjamin, Count Rumford,” 1801; “Tears and Smiles,” 1801; “The Island of Innocence,” 1802; “Pitt and his Statute,” 1802; “The Middlesex Election,” 1802; “The Horrors of Bribery,” 1802; “Great Cry and Little Wool,” 1804; “An Instructive Epistle to the Lord Mayor,” 1804; “Tristia,” 1806; “One More Peep at the Royal Academy,” 1808; “The Fall of Portugal,” 1808; “Works” (4 vols.), 1809; “Carlton House Fête,” 1811; “Works” (5 vols.), 1812; “An Address to be spoken at the Opening of Drury-Lane Theatre” (anon.), 1813; “Royalty Fog-bound,” 1814; “The Regent and the King,” 1814; “Midnight Dreams,” 1814; “Tom Halliard,” [1815?J. He edited: Pilkington’s “Dictionary of Painters,” 1799; “The Beauties of English Poetry,” 1804.

Personal

  The concealed author of “Lyrick Odes,” by Peter Pindar, Esquire, is one Woolcot, a clergyman, who abjured the gown, and now lives in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, under the character of a physician. He is likewise author of a scurrilous epistle lately published, addressed to James Boswell, Esq., March 4th, 1786. He is noted for impudence, lewdness, and almost every species of profligacy.

  Dined with Thelwall. A large party. The man whom we went to see, and, if we could, admire, was Dr. Wolcott, better known as Peter Pindar. He talked about the artists, said that West could paint neither ideal beauty nor from nature, called Opie the Michael Angelo of old age, complained of the ingratitude of certain artists who owed everything to himself, spoke contemptuously of Sir Walter Scott, who, he said, owed his popularity to hard names. He also declaimed against rhyme in general, which he said was fit only for burlesque…. As Peter Pindar was blind, I was requested to help him to his wine, which was in a separate pint bottle, and was not wine at all, but brandy…. I referred to his own writings. He said he recollected them with no pleasure. “Satire is a bad trade.”

  He always sat in a room facing the south. Behind the door stood a square piano-forte, on which there generally lay his favourite Cremona violin; on the left, a mahogany table with writing materials. Everything was in perfect order…. Facing him, over the mantlepiece, hung a fine landscape by Richard Wilson…. In writing, except a few lines haphazard, the Doctor was obliged to employ an amanuensis. Of all his acquisitions, music to him remained alone unaltered…. He even composed light airs for amusement.

  He was as little fitted for a doctor of medicine as for a doctor of divinity. He could better epigrammatize than prescribe, preferred ridiculing to healing, and had a keener eye for mental or personal obliquities than for corporal infirmities…. Wolcot’s vanity is irrepressible. Peter is always the prominent picture. He writes to everybody about himself, and he is the central orb round which kings and subjects, and indeed the whole creation, move. His pension, his prophecy, his paintings, his praise, his censure, and his criticisms are to annihilate all other topics. The desire to silence such a critic was quite natural. Nobody likes to be laughed at, and it is not all laughter, for he sometimes uses a whip of scorpions, and lashes sore places with the delight of a Mephistopheles. That in those libel-hunting days he should have escaped unscathed can only be attributed to the fear of giving wider circulation to his incisive jokes, many of which remain indelibly associated with the blunderings and stutterings of the “Good King George.”

  Wolcot was buried in the Church of St. Paul, Covent Garden, at his own request that he might “lie as near as possible to the bones of old Hudibras Butler.” His grave is believed to be under the floor of the vestry-room; but there is no tablet to his memory.

  In appearance Wolcot was “a thick squat man with a large dark and flat face, and no speculation in his eye.” He possessed considerable accomplishments, being a fair artist and good musician, and, despite the character of his compositions, his friends described him as of a “kind and hearty disposition.” He was probably influenced in his writings by no real animosity towards royalty, and himself confessed that “the king had been a good subject to him, and he a bad one to the king.”

General

  There is an obscure person, stiling himself Peter Pindar, of whom I shall say a few words. This man certainly possesses a mind by no means uninformed, and a species of humour; but it is exhausted by a repetition of the same manner, and nearly the same ideas, even to disgust. He has the power of rhyming ludicrously, and is sometimes even gifted with poetry; and finally, he is puffed up with a vanity and self conceited importance, almost without a parallel. This obscure man has contrived, by these qualifications, to thrust himself upon the publick notice, and become the scorn of every man of character and of virtue. Such is the blasphemy, such is the impiety, the obscenity, the impudence and the contempt of all decent respect, which pervade his numerous pamphlets in verse, that the reader is ill repaid by the lively sallies of humour which frequently animate this mass of crudities. I form my judgment from his works, and not from any acquaintance whatever with the man…. Posterity (if it can be supposed that such trash should exist) will be astonished, that the present age could look with patience on such malignant ribaldry.

  I cannot tell you how much I admire and despise Peter; he is every way original, and most original in this respect, that I know not that ever any other object at once excited my contempt and admiration. His humour is most peculiar, most unaffected, most irresistible. Yet, for what end Providence intrusted a weapon so dangerous in the hands of one who avows his disregard of everything sacred and venerable, is very difficult for us to conjecture. I am the more fully convinced of the bad tendency of his writings, from the amusement I derive from them, forearmed as I am by a disgust at his want of principle and decency. “Bozzy and Piozzi,” however, is above praise and beyond censure: there the satire is so just, so pointed, so characteristic, that one can laugh without self-reproach. The “Lousiad,” however, I regard with a mixture of contempt and disgust.

  The most unsparing calumniator of his time.

  There are a few fables of Peter Pindar in the exact style of La Fontaine, and I think them among the best in the language.

  Wolcot had an eye for little that was grave in life, except the face-makings of absurdity and pretension; but these he could mimic admirably, putting on at one and the same time their most nonchalant and matter-of-course airs, while he fetched out into his countenance the secret nonsense. He echoes their words, with some little comment of approval, or change in their position; some classical inversion, or exaltation, which exposes the pretension in the very act of admitting it, and has an irresistibly ludicrous effect.

  Dr. Wolcot was certainly one of the most original poets England has produced; his production displaying not merely wit and smartness, but a profound knowledge of the world and of the human heart, combined with a sound and cultivated understanding. His serious poems evince the same command of language and originality of ideas as are displayed in his satires, though he excelled in the latter.

  I am not sure that I do not prefer Wolcot (Peter Pindar) to Churchill.

  The most voluminous, and one of the best, of the humourous poets who have written in the English language.

  Wolcot was equal to Churchill as a satirist, as ready and versatile in his powers, and possessed of a quick sense of the ludicrous, as well as a rich vein of fancy and humour. Some of his songs and serious effusions are tender and pleasing; but he could not write long without sliding into the ludicrous and burlesque. His critical acuteness is evinced in his “Odes to the Royal Academicians,” in various passages scattered throughout his works; while his ease and felicity, both of expression and illustration, are remarkable.

  At this distance the fun and sport and spontaneous overflowing laughter of the satirist, and the perfect and laughable distinctness of the figure he sets before us, are far more conspicuous than any political mischief that could have been in them. The story of the Dumpling, over which the inquisitive king puzzled his brains to know how the apples got into it, and the visit of his Majesty to Whitbread’s brewery, are still as amusing as when they were written; and few of the personages in grave historical biography stand out with half the force which characterises this careless light-hearted picture, in which the fun is so much more prominent than the satire.

  Neither Charles the Second at the hands of Marvell, nor George the Fourth at the hands of Moore, received anything like the steady fire of lampoon which Wolcot for years poured upon the most harmless and respectable of English monarchs. George the Third had indeed no vices,—unless a certain parsimony may be dignified by that name,—but he had many foibles of the kind that is more useful to the satirist than even vice. Wolcot’s extreme coarseness, his triviality of subject, and a vulgarity of thought which is quite a different thing from either, are undeniable. But “The Lousiad” (a perfect triumph of cleverness expended on what the Greeks called rhyparography), the famous pieces on George and the Apple Dumplings and on the King’s visit to Whitbread’s Brewery, with scores of other things of the same kind (the best of all, perhaps, being the record of the Devonshire Progress), exhibit incredible felicity and fertility in the lower kinds of satire.