Yet some affirm no enemies they are,
But meet just like prize-fighters in a fair,
Who first shake hands before they box,
Then give each other plaguy knocks,
With all the love and kindness of a brother:
So-many a suffering patient saith-
Though the apothecary fights with Death,
Still they're sworn friends to one another.

A member of this Esculapian line, Lived at Newcastle-upon-Tyne : No man could better gild a pill,

Or make a bill;

Or mix a draught, or bleed, or blister ;

Or draw a tooth out of your head ;
Or chatter scandal by your bed;
Or give a clyster.

Of occupations these were quantum suff.:
Yet still he thought the list not long enough;
And therefore midwifery he chose to pin to 't.
This balanced things; for if he hurled

A few score mortals from the world,

He made amends by bringing others into 't.

His fame full six miles round the country ran;
In short, in reputation he was solus:
All the old women called him 'a fine man!'
His name was Bolus.

Benjamin Bolus, though in trade

Which oftentimes will genius fetterRead works of fancy, it is said,

And cultivated the belles-lettres.

And why should this be thought so odd? Can't men have taste who cure a phthisic? Of poetry though patron god,

Apollo patronises physic.

Bolus loved verse, and took so much delight in 't, That his prescriptions he resolved to write in 't.

No opportunity he e'er let pass

Of writing the directions on his labels
In dapper couplets, like Gay's Fables,
Or rather like the lines in Hudibras.
Apothecary's verse! and where's the treason?
'Tis simply honest dealing; not a crime;
When patients swallow physic without reason,
It is but fair to give a little rhyme.

He had a patient lying at Death's door,

Some three miles from the town, it might be four;
To whom, one evening, Bolus sent an article
In pharmacy that's called cathartical.
And on the label of the stuff

He wrote this verse,

Which one would think was clear enough,

And terse:

When taken,

To be well shaken.

Next morning early, Bolus rose, And to the patient's house he goes Upon his pad,

Who a vile trick of stumbling had :

Lodgings for Single Gentlemen.

Who has ere been in London, that overgrown place,
Has seen Lodgings to Let' stare him full in the face;
Some are good, and let dearly; while some, 'tis well
known,

Are so dear, and so bad, they are best let alone.

Will Waddle, whose temper was studious and lonely,
Hired lodgings that took single gentlemen only;
But Will was so fat, he appeared like a tun,
Or like two single gentlemen rolled into one.
He entered his rooms, and to bed he retreated,
But all the night long he felt fevered and heated;
And though heavy to weigh as a score of fat sheep,
He was not by any means heavy to sleep.

Next night 'twas the same; and the next, and the next;
He perspired like an ox; he was nervous and vexed;
Week passed after week, till, by weekly succession,
His weakly condition was past all expression.

In six months his acquaintance began much to doubt him
For his skin, like a lady's loose gown,' hung about him
He sent for a doctor, and cried like a ninny :

'I have lost many pounds-make me well-there's guinea.'

The doctor looked wise: A slow fever,' he said:
Prescribed sudorifics and going to bed.
'Sudorifics in bed,' exclaimed Will, are humbugs!
I've enough of them there without paying for drugs!'

Will kicked out the doctor; but when ill indeed,
E'en dismissing the doctor don't always succeed;
So, calling his host, he said: 'Sir, do you know,
I'm the fat single gentleman six months ago?

'Look 'e, landlord, I think,' argued Will with a grin,
'That with honest intentions you first took me in:
But from the first night—and to say it I'm bold—
I've been so hanged hot that I'm sure I caught cold.'

Quoth the landlord: Till now I ne'er had a dispute;
I've let lodgings ten years; I'm a baker to boot;
In airing your sheets, sir, my wife is no sloven ;
And your bed is immediately over my oven.'

In that excellent bed died three people of fashion. Why so crusty, good sir?' 'Zounds!' cries Will, in a taking,

'Who wouldn't be crusty with half a year's baking?' Will paid for his rooms; cried the host, with a sneer, 'Well, I see you 've been going away half a year.' 'Friend, we can't well agree; yet no quarrel,' Will said; 'But I'd rather not perish while you make your bread.'

William Combe (1741-1823), author of Dr Syntax, was born at Bristol, and from Eton proceeded to Oxford, but left without a degree. 'Godson' (or natural son) of a rich London alderman, who died in 1762, leaving him £2150, he led for some years the life of an adventurer, now keeping a princely style at the fashionable watering-places, anon serving as cook at Douai College and as a common soldier. His last forty-three years were passed mostly within the 'rules' of the King's Bench debtors' prison. Of the eighty-six works by him published in 1774-1824, the Three Tours of Dr Syntax (1812-21) alone are remembered; and even they owe much to Rowlandson's illustrations. For the first and best of the Tours, the publisher got plates from Rowlandson to begin with, and applied to Combe for letterpress. Combe accordingly

'wrote up' to the pictures month by month, and the joint work appeared in successive numbers of Ackermann's Poetical Magazine (1809-11). To none of his works did Combe affix his name, but he had no reluctance in assuming the names of others. Among his literary frauds was a collection of Letters of the late Lord Lyttelton (1780–82). The second or 'wicked Lord Lyttelton' (son of the first; see page 348) was remarkable for his talents and profligacy, and for the mystery about his sudden death, foretold, as Dr Johnson was 'willing to believe,' by an apparition. Combe personated the character of this dissolute nobleman-with whom he had been at school at Eton -and the spurious Letters are marked by ease, elegance, and occasional force of style. An attempt was made in the Quarterly Review for December 1851 to prove that these Letters were genuine, and that Lyttelton was the author of Junius's Letters. The proof was wholly inconclusive, and there seems no doubt that Combe

wrote the pseudo-Lyttelton epistles. In the same vein he manufactured a series of Letters supposed to have passed between Sterne and Eliza. He wrote a satirical work, The Diaboliad, and a continuation of Le Sage, entitled The Devil upon Two Sticks in England (1790). Combe wrote other poems in the style of Syntax-as Johnny Quæ Genus, The English Dance of Death, The Dance of Life, &c.-besides a History of Westminster Abbey (2 vols. 1812) and other serious books. Gilpin's Forest Scenery, his many tours, and his Picturesque Remarks, and Price's Essay on the Picturesque indicate only two of several persons and fashions he was hitting at in his Dr Syntax. In the first tour, described as 'in search of the picturesque' (the others being in search of consolation after his first wife's death, and in search of a new wife), the doctor, an ungainly figure with a long nose, projecting chin, and ill-fitting bunchy wig, is represented as setting out, losing his way, stopped by highwaymen and bound to a tree, disputing with a landlady, pursued by a bull, mistaking a gentleman's house for an inn, losing his money on a race-course, sketching after nature, and so on. The humour is at best very thin, and turns much on eating and drinking (occasionally to excess) and taking one's ease in an inn; the whole is drearily Philistine in conception, and frequently spiritless and pointless in execution; and the Hudibrastic verse, though not without point, is wholly without charm. Yet the thing was immensely popular, and an 1838 edition was elaborately illustrated anew by 'Alfred Crowquill' (Forrester). The first canto runs thus:

The school was done, the business o'er,
When, tired of Greek and Latin lore,
Good SYNTAX sought his easy-chair,
And sat in calm composure there.
His wife was to a neighbour gone,
To hear the chit-chat of the town;
And left him the unfrequent power
Of brooding through a quiet hour.
Thus, while he sat, a busy train
Of images besieged his brain.
Of church-preferment he had none;
Nay, all his hope of that was gone.
He felt that he content must be
With drudging in a curacy.
Indeed, on every Sabbath-day,
Through eight long miles he took his way,
To preach, to grumble, and to pray;
To cheer the good, to warn the sinner,
And, if he got it,―eat a dinner :
To bury these, to christen those,
And marry such fond folks as chose
To change the tenor of their life,
And risk the matrimonial strife.
Thus were his weekly journies made,
'Neath summer suns and wintry shade;
And all his gains, it did appear,
Were only thirty pounds a-year.
Besides, th' augmenting taxes press,
To aid expense and add distress:

Mutton and beef, and bread and beer,
And every thing was grown so dear;
The boys, too, always prone to eat,
Delighted less in books than meat ;
So that, when holy Christmas came,
His earnings ceased to be the same,
And now, alas! could do no more,
Than keep the wolf without the door.
E'en birch, the pedant master's boast,
Was so increased in worth and cost,
That oft, prudentially beguil'd,
To save the rod, he spared the child.
Thus, if the times refused to mend,
He to his school must put an end.
How hard his lot! how blind his fate!
What shall he do to mend his state?
Thus did poor Syntax ruminate;
When, as the vivid meteors fly,
And instant light the gloomy sky,
A sudden thought across him came,
And told the way to wealth and fame;
And, as th' expanding vision grew
Wider and wider to his view,
The painted fancy did beguile
His woe-worn phiz into a smile:

But, while he paced the room around,
Or stood immersed in thought profound,
The Doctor, 'midst his rumination,
Was wakened by a visitation
Which troubles many a poor man's life-
The visitation of his wife.

Good Mrs Syntax was a lady,

Ten years, perhaps, beyond her hey-day ;
But though the blooming charms had flown,
That graced her youth, it still was known
The love of power she never lost,

As Syntax found it to his cost;
For as her words were used to flow,
He but replied or YES or NO.
Whene'er enraged by some disaster,
She'd shake the boys and cuff the master;
Nay, to avenge the slightest wrong,
She could employ both arms and tongue;
And, if we list to country tales,
She sometimes would enforce her nails.
Her face was red, her form was fat,
A round-about, and rather squat ;
And when in angry humour stalking,
Was like a dumpling set a-walking.
'Twas not the custom of this spouse
To suffer long a quiet house:
She was among those busy wives,
Who hurry-scurry through their lives;
And make amends for fading beauty
By telling husbands of their duty.

John Wolcot (1738-1819) was a lively, coarse, and copious satirist, who, under the name of 'Peter Pindar,' published a multitude of rhymes on public men and events-many of them on George III., an admirable subject for his jest. Born at Dodbrooke near Kingsbridge in Devonshire, Wolcot was educated at Kingsbridge, at Bodmin, and in Normandy, at the cost of an uncle, a respectable surgeon and apothecary of the little Cornish seaport of Fowey; and then, having studied medicine

for seven years under him, walked the London hospitals, and got an M.D. at Aberdeen (1767). With Sir William Trelawney he went as medical attendant to Jamaica, where his social ways made him a favourite; but his time being only partly employed by his professional duties, he solicited and obtained from his patron the gift of a church living then vacant, and the Bishop of London ordained the graceless neophyte (1769). His congregation consisted mostly of negroes, and Sunday being their principal holiday and market, the attendance at the church was at best meagre. Sometimes not a soul appeared, when Wolcot and his clerk would, after waiting ten minutes, proceed to the seashore and shoot ring-tailed pigeons. The death in 1772 of Sir William Trelawney cut off further hopes of preferment there; so bidding adieu to Jamaica and the Church, Wolcot accompanied Lady Trelawney to England, and established himself as a physician at Truro. While in Cornwall Wolcot discovered the artistic talents of Opie—

The Cornish boy in tin-mines bred;

and materially assisted to form his taste and procure him patronage; and in 1780, when Opie's fame was well established, the doctor and his protégé repaired to London. Wolcot had already acquired distinction by his satirical efforts; he now poured forth a long series of caustic odes and epistles, commencing with truculent criticisms of the Royal Academicians; and in 1785 he produced no less than twenty-three 'odes.' In 1786 he published The Lousiad, a Heroi-comic Poem, in five cantos, founded on the legend that an obnoxious insect had been discovered on the king's plate among some green peas, which produced a solemn decree that all the servants in the royal kitchen were to have their heads shaved. The publication of Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides afforded another tempting opportunity, and he indited an epistle commencing:

O Boswell, Bozzy, Bruce, whate'er thy name,
Thou mighty shark for anecdote and fame;
Thou jackal, leading lion Johnson forth
To eat Macpherson 'midst his native north ;
To frighten grave professors with his roar,
And shake the Hebrides from shore to shore,
All hail!...

Triumphant thou through Time's vast gulf shall sail,
The pilot of our literary whale;

Close to the classic Rambler shalt thou cling,
Close as a supple courtier to a king ;

Fate shall not shake thee off with all its power;
Stuck like a bat to some old ivied tower.

Nay, though thy Johnson ne'er had blessed thine eyes,
Paoli's deeds had raised thee to the skies :

Yes, his broad wing had raised thee-no bad hack— A tomtit twittering on an eagle's back. Bozzy and Piozzi, or the British Biographers, was another attack. The personal habits of the king| -'the Best of Kings' or 'the King of glory'were ridiculed in Peeps at St James's, Royal Visits,

Lyric Odes, and the like. Sir Joseph Banks was not beyond the reach of his satire :

A president, in butterflies profound,

Of whom all insect-mongers sing the praises,
Went on a day to hunt this game renowned,

On violets, dunghills, nettle-tops, and daisies. Bruce the Abyssinian gave him an exceptionally favourable chance: the importance of the marvellous is set out by allusions to Scriptural miracles on one hand, and to Psalmanazar, Mandeville, Pontoppidan, and Katerfelto on the other. Tom Paine and Mr Pitt, Pye the laureate, Count Rumford, Lord Macartney, and Kien Long, Emperor of China-all furnish subjects for clever but unmannerly comment. From 1778 to 1808 above sixty of these verse pamphlets were issued by Wolcot. So formidable was he, he alleged, that the Ministry endeavoured to bribe him to silence; and he boasted that his writings had been translated into six different languages. In 1795 he obtained from his booksellers an annuity of £250, payable half-yearly, for the copyright of his works. This handsome allowance he enjoyed, to the heavy loss of his booksellers, for twenty years. Neither old age nor blindness could repress his witty vituperative attacks. He had the regular help of an amanuensis, but in his absence continued to write himself. 'His method was to tear a sheet of paper into quarters, on each of which he wrote a stanza of four or six lines, according to the nature of the poem: the paper he placed on a book held in the left hand, and in this manner not only wrote legibly, but with great ease and celerity.' In 1796 his productions were collected and published in four volumes, and several editions were issued ; but most of the 'poems' are forgotten. Few satirists can reckon on permanent popularity, and Wolcot's things were inevitably ephemeral; while the recklessness of his censure and ridicule, and the obvious lack of decency, principle, or good moral feeling, hastened oblivion. And in vituperative brutality he met more than his match in Gifford, whose Epistle to Peter Pindar (1800) provoked the hero of so many wordy wars to a personal assault on Gifford in a bookseller's shop. An unsuccessful action of crim. con. was brought against him in 1807; he died at his house in Somers' Town (January 1819), and was buried in a vault in the churchyard of St Paul's, Covent Garden, close to the grave of Butler.

Wolcot was as ready and versatile as Churchill, though usually ruder and more rugged in style, with a quick sense of the ludicrous, not a little real wit and humour, real critical acumen, and a command of stinging and epigrammatic phrases. He had great facility in a vast variety of styles, satirical, merely comic, and quite serious. He wrote 'new-old' ballads in pseudo-antique spelling, and verse-tales in the broadest Devonshire dialect. Some of the songs are good. The Beggar Man and

other serious pieces are actually tender: Burns admired his Lord Gregory, and wrote another ballad on the same subject; the love or courtesy verses to Chloe and Julia and Celia and Phillida are wonderfully like anybody else's; but he could not write long without sliding into the ludicrous and burlesque. Much of his work is still amusing; many passages that are now dreary enough reading were doubtless once sufficiently pointed; the easy command of rhymes and loose rhythms reminds one sometimes of Don Juan, sometimes of the Ingoldsby Legends. Extraordinary variety

and felicity of expression and illustration are almost everywhere in evidence, as in Peter's lively critique of Dr Johnson's style:

I own I like not Johnson's turgid style,
That gives an inch the importance of a mile,
Casts of manure a wagon-load around,
To raise a simple daisy from the ground;
Uplifts the club of Hercules-for what?
To crush a butterfly or brain a gnat?
Creates a whirlwind from the earth, to draw
A goose's feather or exalt a straw;

Sets wheels on wheels in motion-such a clatter-
To force up one poor nipperkin of water;
Bids ocean labour with tremendous roar,
To heave a cockle-shell upon the shore;
Alike in every theme his pompous art,
Heaven's awful thunder or a rumbling cart!

The Pilgrims and the Peas.

A brace of sinners, for no good,

Were ordered to the Virgin Mary's shrine, Who at Loretto dwelt in wax, stone, wood, And in a curled white wig looked wondrous fine.

Fifty long miles had these sad rogues to travel,
With something in their shoes much worse than gravel;
In short, their toes so gentle to amuse,
The priest had ordered peas into their shoes.

A nostrum famous in old popish times
For purifying souls that stunk with crimes,
A sort of apostolic salt,

That popish parsons for its powers exalt,
For keeping souls of sinners sweet,
Just as our kitchen salt keeps meat.

The knaves set off on the same day,
Peas in their shoes, to go and pray;

But very different was their speed, I wot:
One of the sinners galloped on,
Light as a bullet from a gun;

The other limped as if he had been shot.

One saw the Virgin, soon peccavi cried,

Had his soul whitewashed all so clever;

When home again he nimbly hied,

Made fit with saints above to live for ever.

In coming back, however, let me say,
He met his brother rogue about half-way,
Hobbling with outstretched bum and bending knees,
Cursing the souls and bodies of the peas;

His eyes in tears, his cheeks and brow in sweat,
Deep sympathising with his groaning feet.

'How now!' the light-toed whitewashed pilgrim 'You lazy lubber!'

'Ods curse it!' cried t'other, ''tis no joke;
My feet, once hard as any rock,
Are now as soft as blubber.

'Excuse me, Virgin Mary, that I swear :
As for Loretto, I shall not get there;
No! to the Devil my sinful soul must go,
For damme if I ha'n't lost every toe!

'But, brother sinner, do explain
How 'tis that you are not in pain-

[broke,

What power hath worked a wonder for your toesWhilst I, just like a snail, am crawling, Now swearing, now on saints devoutly bawling, Whilst not a rascal comes to ease my woes?

'How is 't that you can like a greyhound go, Merry as if that nought had happened, burn ye?' 'Why,' cried the other, grinning, 'you must know That just before I ventured on my journey, To walk a little more at ease, I took the liberty to boil my peas.'

The Apple Dumplings and a King. Once on a time, a monarch, tired with hooping, Whipping and spurring,

Happy in worrying

A poor defenceless harmless buck, (The horse and rider wet as muck,) From his high consequence and wisdom stooping, Entered through curiosity a cot,

Where sat a poor old woman and her pot. The wrinkled, blear-eyed good old granny, In this same cot, illumined by many a cranny, Had finished apple dumplings for her pot:

Then taking up a dumpling in his hand,
His eyes with admiration did expand;

And oft did majesty the dumpling grapple :

'Tis monstrous, monstrous hard, indeed,' he cried. 'What makes it, pray, so hard?' The dame replied, Low curtsying: 'Please your majesty, the apple.'

'Very astonishing indeed! strange thing!'. Turning the dumpling round—rejoined the king. "Tis most extraordinary, then, all this is— It beats Pinetti's conjuring all to pieces : Strange I should never of a dumpling dream! But, goody, tell me where, where, where's the seam?' 'Sir, there's no seam,' quoth she; 'I never knew That folks did apple dumplings sew.'

'No' cried the staring monarch with a grin;
'How, how the devil got the apple in ?'

On which the dame the curious scheme revealed
By which the apple lay so sly concealed,

Which made the Solomon of Britain start;
Who to the palace with full speed repaired,
And queen and princesses so beauteous scared
All with the wonders of the dumpling art.
There did he labour one whole week to shew
The wisdom of an apple-dumpling maker;
And, lo so deep was majesty in dough,

The palace seemed the lodging of a baker!

Muse, sing the stir that happy Whitbread made:
Poor gentleman! most terribly afraid

He should not charm enough his guests divine,
He gave his maids new aprons, gowns, and smocks;
And lo! two hundred pounds were spent in frocks,
To make the apprentices and draymen fine:
Busy as horses in a field of clover,

Dogs, carts, and chairs, and stools were tumbled over, Amidst the Whitbread rout of preparation,

To treat the lofty ruler of the nation.

Now moved king, queen, and princesses so grand,
To visit the first brewer in the land;
Who sometimes swills his beer and grinds his meat
In a snug corner, christened Chiswell Street;
But oftener, charmed with fashionable air,
Amidst the gaudy great of Portman Square.

Lord Aylesbury, and Denbigh's lord also,

His Grace the Duke of Montague likewise, With Lady Harcourt, joined the raree show

And fixed all Smithfield's marvelling eyes: For lo! a greater show ne'er graced those quarters, Since Mary roasted, just like crabs, the martyrs.