The fate which usually attends political and satirical writings that owe their origin to passing events, has in no way affected the Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, which, after a lapse of more than ninety years, still continues to interest and amuse. Public opinion never fails, sooner or later, to arrive at a just conclusion as to the merits both of individuals and actions; and though it may often neglect to preserve a meritorious work, never perpetuates a worthless one. Poetry which lashed with so remorseless a hand the patriotic proceedings, and held up to ridicule the persons and habits, of the most distinguished Whig leaders, must have possessed no common merit to have won the encomiums of such liberal politicians and such critics as Mackintosh and Jeffrey, Moore and Byron.

Moore, in his Life of Sheridan, observes: “The Rolliad and The Anti-Jacobin may, on their respective sides of the question, be considered as models of that style of political satire whose lightness and vivacity give it the appearance of proceeding rather from the wantonness of wit than of ill-nature, and whose very malice, from the fancy with which it is mixed up, like certain kinds of fire-works, explodes in sparkles”. This criticism might be applied to some of his own political squibs.

As the poems refer to occurrences long since past, a rapid glance at the state of events at that time (1797–8) may render them more intelligible to the generality of readers.

The affairs of England were then in a critical position. The ministry of Pitt was carrying on a fierce war with republican France, the necessity for which had split the public into two great parties. The liberal party alleged, that “the whole misfortunes of Europe and all the crimes of France had arisen from the iniquitous coalition of kings to overturn its infant freedom;—that, if its government had been left alone, it would neither have stained its hands with innocent blood at home nor pursued plans of aggrandizement abroad; and that the Republic, relieved from the pressure of external danger, and no longer roused by the call of patriotic duty, would have quietly turned its swords into pruning-hooks, and, renouncing the allurements of foreign conquests, thought only of promoting the internal felicity of its citizens”.

These sentiments, though supported by the extraordinary eloquence of Fox, Sheridan, Erskine, and others, had but little weight with the minister or the great body of the public. It was impossible to deny that the power of the French Republic was daily increasing, and threatened the subjugation of the greater part of Europe. Buonaparte had overrun Italy, and broken the power of Austria, which, by the treaty of Leoben, was compelled to cede the Netherlands to France, allow the free navigation of the Rhine, and recognise the independence of the newly-erected Italian republics. Spain, also, had declared war against Britain, which was thus left to contend singly against the power of France; for the Directory had refused the basis of peace proposed by Lord Malmesbury, that of a mutual restitution of conquests. To add to these embarrassments, during the year 1797 credit became affected, and the Bank of England suspended cash payments; mutinies broke out in the fleets at Spithead and the Nore; and Ireland was on the verge of rebellion. But the talents of Pitt were equal to the occasion, and his power rose higher than ever, when his prognostications were shortly after (in December, 1797) confirmed by the unprovoked attack upon Switzerland by the French. The impolicy of this proceeding was equal to its infamy; for nothing ever done by the revolutionary government contributed so powerfully to cool the ardour of its partisans in Europe, and to open the eyes of the intelligent and respectable classes in every other country to its ultimate designs. Its effect on the friends of freedom in England may be judged of from the indignant protest of Sir James Mackintosh, himself once a warm admirer of the French Revolution, who, in his defence of Jean Peltier, in 1803, for a libel on Buonaparte, declared, “the invasion and destruction of Switzerland an act, in comparison with which all the deeds of rapine and blood perpetrated in the world are innocence itself”. Even before this, the true character of the revolution had been detected by the democratic Coleridge, who gave public utterance to his feelings of horror and disgust in that noble Ode to France written in February, 1797. In a word, to say nothing of her other conquests, France, at the beginning of 1798, had three affiliated republics at her side, the Batavian, Cisalpine, and the Ligurian; before its close she had organized three more, the Helvetic, the Roman, and the Parthenopeian.

Pitt’s influence was further increased by the threatened invasion of Great Britain by the French, a proceeding which, as it affected every class in the country, raised the national enthusiasm to the highest pitch, inflamed as it already was by the recent glorious victories off Cape St. Vincent and Camperdown. That they were likely to be in earnest had been already shown by their expeditions to Bantry Bay and Pembrokeshire, and Buonaparte’s boast at Geneva, that “he would democratize England in three months,” proved how much he relied upon the support of the malcontents both in Great Britain and Ireland. The estimates and preparations for defence were, enormous; taxes, to an extent utterly unknown before, were laid on; the Volunteer Bill was passed (Sheridan assisting), by which, in addition to the regular army, a hundred and fifty thousand volunteers were, in a few weeks, in arms; The King was authorized by another bill, in the event of an invasion, to call out the levy, en masse, of the population; the Alien Bill was reenacted; and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act continued for another year.

But the genius of one man, however great, can effect but little, unless suitably supported by others. The sagacious mind of Pitt had long seen that his party in Parliament were, with very few exceptions, no match for his numerous opponents, powerful both in talent and social position; among whom were Fox, Sheridan, Erskine, Horne Tooke, Whitbread, Nicholls, Courtenay, Fitzpatrick, the Dukes of Norfolk and Bedford, Lord Stanhope, the Duchess of Devonshire, and others. He was always anxious, therefore, to secure whatever available talent presented itself, and immediately on their appearance enlisted under his banners Canning, Jenkinson, Huskisson, and Castlereagh, all men of the same standing, for the first three were born in 1770, and the last in 1769.

The important assistance of Canning was immediately felt, for he was, in the words of Byron, “a genius—almost a universal one; an orator, a wit, a poet, a statesman”. Though he entered Parliament at the early age of 23 (in 1793), and attained the post of Under-Secretary of State for the Foreign Department two years after, he was by no means inexperienced either as a writer or as an orator; for while a student at Eton he had won distinction by his contributions to The Microcosm, a weekly paper published by the more advanced Etonians, and also in the discussions of their Debating Society, which were conducted with strict regard to parliamentary usages. And afterwards, while studying for the law, he took an active part in the proceedings of the debating societies of the metropolis, in which he achieved so much reputation as to lead to his introduction to Pitt, whose party he unhesitatingly joined.

Canning early saw the necessity of the Government’s possessing some literary engine, which, like the Whig Rolliad, published some years before, should carry confusion into the ranks of its enemies. In a lucky hour he conceived the idea of The Anti-Jacobin, a weekly newspaper, interspersed with poetry, the avowed object of which was to expose the vicious doctrines of the French Revolution, and to turn into ridicule and contempt the advocates of that event, and the sticklers for peace and parliamentary reform. The editor was William Gifford, whose vigorous and unscrupulous pen had been already shown in his Baviad and MÆviad; and among the regular writers were: John Hookham Frere, Jenkinson (afterwards Earl of Liverpool), George Ellis (who had previously contributed to the Whig Rolliad), Lord Clare, Lord Mornington (afterwards Marquis Wellesley), Lord Morpeth (afterwards Earl of Carlisle), Baron Macdonald, and others. These gentlemen entered upon their task with no common spirit. Their purpose was to blacken their adversaries, and they spared no means, fair or foul, in the attempt. Their most distinguished countrymen, whose only fault was their being opposed to government, were treated with no more respect than their foreign adversaries, and were held up to public execration as traitors, blasphemers, and debauchees. So alarmed, however, became Wilberforce and others of the more moderate supporters of ministers at the boldness of the language employed, that Pitt was induced to interfere, and, after an existence of eight months, The Anti-Jacobin (in its original form) ceased to exist.

The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin is not exclusively political. The Loves of the Triangles, a parody on Dr. Darwin’s Loves of the Plants, is, in the opinion of a celebrated critic (Lord Jeffrey) of the highest degree of merit; as is also The Progress of Man, a parody on Payne Knight’s Progress of Civil Society; and The Rovers, a burlesque on the German dramas then in vogue, the extraordinary plots of which, as well as their language, alternately ultrasentimental and domestically bathotic, well marked them out for ridicule, is distinguished by sharp wit and broad humour of the happiest kind. Canning and his coadjutors in this piece did a real service to literature, and assisted in a purification which Gifford, by his demolition of the Della Cruscan school of poetry, had so well begun. Of The Friend of Humanity and the Knife-grinder it is unnecessary to speak; perhaps no lines in the English language have been more effective, or oftener quoted.

But Canning’s greatest power is shown in New Morality, which, being the last of the series, seems to have been reserved as a concentrating medium for his pent-up scorn and contempt of the Whigs and their adherents. So that their blows fall thick (for he was powerfully seconded by Frere, Gifford, and Ellis), they care little who suffer from them, and the modern reader is surprised to find Charles Lamb and other non-intruders into politics, figuring as congenial conspirators with Tom Paine!

It is somewhat difficult to regard Pitt in the character of a Wit and a Poet, as from the narrative of most of his biographers, he might be considered as uniformly cold, stiff, and unbending; but his intimate friend Wilberforce, in his Memoirs, thus describes him: “Pitt, when free from shyness, and amongst his intimate companions, was the very soul of merriment and conversation. He was the wittiest man I ever knew, and what was quite peculiar to himself, had at all times his wit under entire controul. Others appeared struck by the unwonted association of brilliant images; but every possible combination of ideas seemed always present to his mind, and he could at once produce whatever he desired. I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare, at the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, the readiest and most apt in the required allusions.” It is not, therefore, at all unlikely, that he now and then contributed witty verses to The Anti-Jacobin, in addition to those which the Editor has, on probable grounds, ascribed to him in the present volume.

“Critical commentary,” says a critic of the previous edition, “on the merits of The Anti-Jacobin, would be superfluous. Its satire is distinguished for the terse language of its poignant personality, which was often excessively stinging, but seldom offensively coarse. Its best contributors, Canning and Frere, were not mere pamphleteers in verse, like the writers for The Rolliad. They had poetical inspiration and a sprightly joyousness springing from a genial play of the mental faculties. They were ‘Conservatives’ not only in their politics but in their loyal adherence to the ordinances and traditions of classical English literature. False sentiment, tumid diction, mawkish cant, were chastised by them with exemplary efficacy. On the fourth edition of the complete work (1799, 2 Vols. 8vo, containing both prose and poetry), they placed the epigraph, Sparsosque recolligit ignes; and in the very last paper (No. 36), the motto on discontinuance was exquisitely happy:—

“And these lines, taken from The Tempest (probably by Canning), have been prophetic of the popularity of their witty verse, still quoted and admired by all lovers of the genius that is airily elegant and strong.”

Water Orton, Birmingham.