e, 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."
Jacobs, in his "Lives of the Poets," speaks of him as a multifarious writer of unreadable trash,--and names but few of his productions. The truth was, Eusden, secluding himself at his rectory among the fens of Lincolnshire, took no part in society, declined all association with the polite circles of the metropolis, thus inviting attacks, from which his talents were not respectable enough to screen him. That the loftiest revelations of poetry were not required of the Laureate of George I., who understood little or no English, there can be no question. George II. was equally insensible to the Muses; and had the annual lyrics been a mosaic of the merest gibberish, they would have satisfied his earlier tastes as thoroughly as the odes of Collins or Gray. A court, at which Pope and Swift, Young and Thomson were strangers, had precisely that share of Augustan splendor which enabled such as Eusden to shine lustrously.[7]
And so Eusden shone and wrote, and in the fulness of time--September, 1730--died and was buried; and his laurel others desired.[8] The leading claimants were Richard Savage and Colley Cibber. The touching story of Savage had won the heart of the Queen, and she had extracted from the King the promise of the Laureateship for its hero.
