himself, in the phrase of "the fancy," game to the backbone. His faults,
besides those incident to most satirists,--such as undue severity,
intrusion into private life, anger darkening into malignity, and spleen
fermenting into venom,--were carelessness of style, inequality, and want
of condensation. Compared to the satires of Pope, Churchill's are far
less polished, and less pointed. Pope stabs with a silver
bodkin--Churchill hews down his opponent with a broadsword. Pope whispers
a word in his enemy's ear which withers the heart within him, and he
sinks lifeless to the ground; Churchill pours out a torrent of blasting
invective which at once kills and buries his foe. Dryden was his
favourite model; and although he has written no such condensed
masterpieces of satire as the characters of Shaftesbury and Buckingham,
yet his works as a whole are not much inferior, and justify the idea that
had his life been spared, he might have risen to the level of "Glorious
John." His versification, too, is decidedly of the Drydenic type. It is a
free, fierce, rushing, sometimes staggering, race across meadow, moor,
and mountain, dreading nothing except repose and languor, the lines
chasing, and sometimes tumbling over each other in their haste, like
impatient hounds at a fox-hunt. But more than Dryden, we think, has
Churchill displayed the genuine poetic faculty, as well as often a
loftier tone of moral indignation. This latter feeling is the inspiration
of "The Candidate," and of "The Times," which, although coarse in
subject, and coarse in style, burns with a fire of righteous indignation,
reminding you of Juvenal. The finest display of his imaginative power is
in "Gotham," which is throughout a glorious rhapsody, resembling some of
the best prose effusions of Christopher North, and abounding in such
lines as these:--

"The cedar, whose top mates the highest cloud,
Whilst his old father Lebanon grows proud