The amusing banter of Mr E.V. Lucas and Mr C.L. Graves, and the delightful parody of Mr Owen Seaman, are the nearest approach that England can now show to the satirical productions for which it was once famous. Indeed, we are becoming an amiable race, developing, or at least feigning, the milk of human kindness to such an extent that even modern caricature can scarcely be distinguished from portraiture, and only Mr Max Beerbohm flings the tomahawk of pictorial satire. A study of the lampoons and the vigorous personal onslaughts in prose and verse of the Georgian days, however, gives us pause for reflection whether we refrain from such practices because of our improved manners or increasing effeminacy: though, perhaps, it may be attributed largely to the signed review which makes it difficult, in these days of numerous literary associations, for a sociable or a nervous scholar to gibbet his erring brethren with an acerbity once general. Certain it is that current criticism is for the most part the art of saying pleasant things graciously, while our excursions into the personal element are usually headed “Appreciations.” Whatever the cause, it is a sad thought for militant spirits that a wave of politeness has engulfed the heretofore blunt, outspoken John Bull, that typical figure, of which—it is pathetic to note in these days of unsuppressed emotion—we are still so proud.

The most casual incursion into Georgian history reveals a great mass of almost forgotten satirical productions, all of it trenchant, most of it coarse and not a little scurrilous, indeed, but much of it readable and amusing. There were scores of virile pamphleteers in the pay of Ministers and Oppositions, as well as a number of independent writers of lampoons on all sorts and conditions of men and things. The best of the latter class was Charles Churchill, the famous author of “The Rosciad” and of those terrible onslaughts on Hogarth and Sandwich, on Martin and other small fry. His mantle was in due course assumed by Wolcot, who, though scarcely remembered to-day, was a man of considerable talent and extensive knowledge, and, though of course without the genius of his predecessor, was widely read, enjoyed a vast popularity, and undoubtedly influenced a great body of people.

John Wolcot, the son of a country surgeon, was born in May 1738. He was educated at various schools of no great repute, and in the early twenties paid a lengthy visit to France, for the inhabitants of which land he conceived the insular prejudice usual in his day:

He studied medicine in London until 1764, when he went as assistant to his uncle, John Wolcot of Fowey, taking a Scotch Degree of Doctor of Medicine three years later, immediately after which, his distant connection, Sir William Trelawny, going to Jamaica as Governor, he accompanied him as physician. In that island he saw little or no prospect of securing a paying practice, and paid a flying visit to England in 1769 to take holy orders. On his return to Jamaica he found that the lucrative living for which he had been destined, had, contrary to expectation, not been vacated, whereupon, after holding a minor clerical post for a few months, he reverted to his old profession, and obtained the post of physician-general to the troops. Sir William Trelawny died at Spanish Town in 1772, and Wolcot again came to England, where he established himself as a doctor at Truro, but, after disputes with his medical confrÈres and the Corporation, removed in 1779 to Helstone and then to Exeter.

Wolcot abandoned the practice of medicine in 1781, when he came to London, urged to this step partly by the desire to advance the prospects of his protÉgÉ, Opie, the painter, and partly by the desire to establish himself there as a man of letters. The last project was not so mad as it may have appeared to his country neighbours, for under the pseudonym of “Peter Pindar” he had already obtained some success with the publication of a “Poetical Epistle to Reviewers” in 1778, in which he declared:

He fulfilled this promise, and in 1782 issued “Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1782,” by “Peter Pindar, Esq., a distant relative of the Poet of Thebes and Laureat to the Academy,” which were at once so successful, that in quick succession came from his fertile pen, “More Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for 1783,” “Lyric Odes for 1785,” and, in 1786, “Farewell Odes to Academicians.” These vigorous verses attracted much attention, for the critic was outspoken in his dislikes, and lashed with the utmost contempt “George’s idol,” West, and other fashionable artists; though he showed his discrimination by praising the works of Gainsborough, Reynolds (“Of whose fine art I own myself a lover”), and of the unfairly neglected Richard Wilson (“By Britain left in poverty to pine”):

It was not because Wolcot had exhausted this vein (for he returned to it again and again, even in 1808 having “One more Peep at the Royal Academy”) that he looked for another theme, but that he discovered, so long as he wrote on art and artists, let him be never so humorous, he would have to be content with praise alone for his reward. No man cared less for money than he, but he certainly thought the labourer worthy of his hire, and, since he depended for his livelihood on his pen, it behoved him to select a subject that would appeal to a larger public. To the exceeding joy of his own and subsequent generations, he decided to exercise his humour at the expense of the King and Queen, with an occasional playful blow at a Minister.

No satirist could ask for better subjects for his wit than George III. and Queen Charlotte. The slow-witted monarch and his parsimonious consort offered every conceivable temptation to Wolcot’s nimble humour, and he was not slow to take advantage of this rare chance. Of course, he was not the first in the field, but he was head and shoulders over his rivals in talent and wit, and, if he did not silence, at least he succeeded in eclipsing them. He was especially fortunate in having accurate information concerning the internal economy of the royal palaces, and, though he took a poet’s licence to embroider the facts, there was always some foundation for his lampoons. Thus, when the King found a noxious insect in his plate at dinner and gave orders that everyone in the kitchens, from chef to scullion, should be shaved, “Peter Pindar” wrote a “heroi-comic poem,” “The Lousiad,” in which he gave a version of the story. “I had this (incident),” he wrote to a friend, “from the cooks themselves, with whom I dined several times at Buckingham House and Windsor, immediately after the ‘shave’ took place.”

So successful was the first canto of “The Lousiad,” which appeared in 1785, that during the next ten years four additional cantos were written, in which members of the Household and Ministers were introduced, scarified and dismissed; but the gem of the collection is the lengthy “Petition of the Cooks,” which, after references to France, the Schwellenberg and Wilkes, concludes:

Eventually the attention of the Privy Council was drawn to this poem, and that body, according to Wolcot, decided to prosecute the author, and refrained from doing so only when it discovered that the poem had its foundation in fact. “Are you sure of a verdict?” it is stated that Chancellor Thurlow inquired; “for, if not so, we shall look like a parcel of fools.” Huish states emphatically that the idea of prosecuting the poet did not originate with the King; and Galt says that the effusions of the satirist produced on George “no other effect than a smile of wonder at the perverse ingenuity of the man: and the most serious thing he was ever known to say of them was on the occasion of Peter’s lampooning General Carpenter, when his Majesty observed, that ‘for himself he cared nothing; but he was hurt to see a worthy man calumniated, because he happened to be one of his servants.’ As far as they were capable of exciting a good-natured laugh, the King enjoyed that laugh as much as any man; and when they were otherwise, as was but too often the case, he observed a dignified forbearance, leaving the author to enjoy all the triumph there might be in making a base attack on a party whom he knew to be precluded, by his dignity, from descending into the arena in his own defence.”

It may, however, he doubted whether Hazlitt was accurate in stating that “the King as well as the nation delighted in the bard,” for George had not a spark of humour in his composition, and was the last man in the nation to take a joke at his own expense in good part.

If, however, the King suffered in silence, the Queen was determined not to submit to similar attacks, and her solicitor warned Wolcot that if he exercised his wit against her Majesty, proceedings would at once be taken—representations that had the desired effect, although they furnished the subject for one of Peter’s verses:

When the Doctor was once reproved by an acquaintance for the liberties he took with his sovereign, “I confess there exists this difference between the King and me,” he replied; “the King has been a good subject to me, but I have been a bad subject to him.” This he admitted, but that he was guilty in any sense of serious offence he pooh-poohed:

Wolcot was clever enough usually to take for his verse topics in which the public were interested, and it was to this acuteness his success with his contemporaries must be largely attributed. He attacked Lord Lonsdale when that nobleman showed a great disregard of his neighbour’s rights, and “expostulated” with Hannah More, when in her “Strictures on Female Education,” she wrote, “The Poets again, to do them justice, are always ready to lend a helping hand when any mischief is to be done.” He inveighed against the strict enforcement of Sunday Observance, which to some extent resulted from Lady Huntingdon’s petition to the King, and the Puritanism of the Methodists:

And he gave a fanciful description of the result of the unpopular Hair-Tax, which, according to him, evoked so much disgust that, “the male sex have already sacrificed their favourite curls, to disappoint the rapacity of a minister.”

Wolcot, as a defender of Mrs Fitzherbert, thought no words too strong in which to express his opinion of those who attacked her, and when John Rolle introduced the question of her marriage to the Prince of Wales in the House of Commons, he fell foul of him, and of Pitt, who supported him:

He had the courage to say a good word for Paine and “The Rights of Man”:

He was fearless in his denunciation of the Duke of York, when it transpired that during the latter’s occupation of the position of Commander-in-Chief, his mistress had been selling commissions and offices, and he voiced the public clamour:

When, as a consequence of the inquiry, the Duke resigned, Wolcot drew a malicious picture of his loneliness:

Wolcot sometimes contrived to combine his attacks upon art and royalty, as in “Subjects for Painters,” in the introduction to which he explained that the rage for historical pictures, “so nobly rewarded by Messieurs Boydell and Macklin,” tempted him to offer subjects that would be useful when the painters had exhausted Shakespeare and Milton.

As a rule, however, Wolcot directed his lampoons against the King, whose foibles he most unmercifully laid bare. He was never weary of decrying a monarch who preferred farming to art, and whose economies were a source of scandal to the whole nation. It is said that the bitterness on this latter score arose from the King having purchased a picture from a friend of the satirist and having given him only half the market value. This, indeed, was only one instance out of many of George’s meanness. He would put an artist to the expense of bringing his pictures to Windsor, and not offer to pay the carriage, even when, in the case of one such command, the cost was twenty-five pounds. He would invite eminent singers and actors to perform at Court functions and give them never a sou, thinking the honour sufficient reward.

Wolcot was never weary of harping upon this unroyal quality that was common to both the sovereigns. He returned to it in the “Odes to Kien Long, Emperor of China.”

The King’s love of farming for profit—a king with a Civil List of eight hundred thousand pounds and occasional special grants amounting to millions—was a subject much discussed, and not likely to escape the attention of our satirist.

Indeed, nothing that the King did was allowed to pass without comment. Did he go to Weymouth, “Peter Pindar” accompanied him in spirit:

Did George visit Samuel Whitebread’s brewery, the event was duly recorded:

Popular as such verses were, and wide as was their circulation, they were easily eclipsed in both respects by those in which the stupidity of the King was chronicled, and people, being so much amused by them, forgot that the foundation of truth was often so built upon as to obscure it. “Peter Pindar” was in his element poking fun at George’s ignorance, as shown when looking through Lord Pembroke’s treasures at Wilton House.

The best thing that Wolcot ever wrote, and one that provoked a laugh all over England, was “The King and the Apple-Dumplings,” in which he described George’s astonishment at first seeing a dumpling, one of which he took into his hand to examine:

Since it was thought unwise to prosecute Wolcot, after a time an endeavour was made to silence him by gentler means, and, through the instrumentality of Yorke, the Government offered the satirist a pension of three hundred a year, at which he professed to be much astonished:

Nothing came of the proposal, for it fell through owing to a difference of opinion as to the conditions which it would carry with it.

Wolcot then made a bid for the favour of the Prince of Wales in the “Expostulatory Odes.”

Thereafter, but not necessarily because of this, he found the Prince nearly as useful a subject for his scathing verses as the King, and when the former was appointed Regent, “Peter Pindar” was ready with “The Royal First-Born, or, The Baby out of his Leading Strings.”

He often returned to administer castigation to the Prince, whose profligacies were notorious, and when the heir-apparent was said to be suffering from a sprained ankle, he voiced the general opinion that the confinement was the result of a thrashing from Lord Yarmouth, whose wife had been insulted by “The First Gentleman of Europe.”

Wolcot’s sight began to fail, and in 1811 he was nearly blind, but he still contrived to continue his literary work almost until his death, which took place on 14th January 1819. By his express desire he was buried in St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, by the side of the coffin which contained the mortal remains of Samuel Butler, of whom, perhaps, and not without some reason, he considered himself a humble disciple.

He was a very sane man, sensible of his limitations, and not given to value his work unduly. Indeed, in his first work, “The Epistle to Reviewers,” he stated the position to which he aspired:

At the same time, he was by no means inclined to hide his light under a bushel, and his verses contain many deliberately humorous references to his talents. “Had I not stepped forward as the Champion of my own Merit (which is deemed so necessary now-a-days for the obtention of public notice, not only by Authors, but by tÊte-makers, perfumers, elastic truss and Parliament-speech makers, &c., who, in the daily newspapers, are the heralds of their own splendid abilities),” he wrote in “Subjects for Painters,” “I might possibly be passed by without observation; and thus a great part of a poetical Immortality be sacrificed to a pitiful mauvaise honte.”

Of course he made many enemies, as every satirist must, but he bore attacks unflinchingly, as, indeed, every satirist should.

As a rule he treated his revilers with good-humoured banter, but once a critic raised his ire by an unmerciful attack on his “Nil Admirari, or, A Smile at a Bishop,” in The Anti-Jacobin, in which he was styled, “this disgraceful subject, the profligate reviler of his sovereign and impudent blasphemer of his God.” Gifford at once issued as a counterblast, “An Epistle to Peter Pindar,” the savagery of which made the subject so sore that he endeavoured to thrash the author, who, however, had the best of the struggle.

Yet the man of whom these words were spoken was described by his friends as of “a kind and hearty disposition,” with little or no malice in his composition, a lover of flowers, music and art. Not even his blindness or the infirmities of age soured his temper, and in his last years he said to Cyrus Redding, “You have seen something of life in your time. See and learn all you can more. You will fall back upon it when you grow old—an old fool is an inexcusable fool to himself and others—store up all; our acquirements are most useful when we become old.” Yet he did not suffer age gladly, and when on his death-bed John Taylor asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” the reply—Wolcot’s last words on earth—came. “Bring me back my youth.”

“The historian of Sir Joseph Banks and The Emperor of Morocco, of the Pilgrims and the Peas, of the Royal Academy, and of Mr Whitebread’s Brewing-Vat, the bard in whom the nation and the King delighted,” Hazlitt wrote the year before the satirist died, “is old and blind, but still merry and wise; remembering how he has made the world laugh in his time, and not repenting of the mirth he has given; with an involuntary smile lighted up at the mad pranks of his Muse, and the lucky hits of his pen—‘faint pictures of those flashes of his spirit, that were wont to set the table in a roar’; like his own expiring taper, bright and fitful to the last; tagging a rhyme or conning his own epitaph; and waiting for the last summons, grateful and contented.” Indeed, while the coarseness and offensiveness of many of Wolcot’s works must be admitted and deplored, it is impossible not to like the man, for he was such a jovial wight, so well able to appreciate a joke against himself and ready to join in the laugh, a very prince of good fellows in an age of less severe restrictions in taste and morality.