"He was not for an age, but for all time,"
said one poet of another. There are two ways of belonging to one's age. You are born of it--you die with it. Johnson disclaims for Shakspeare the co-etaneousness by birth and by death. He is the son of all time; and the inheritor of all time. His mind is the mind of ages deceased, and of ages unborn; and his writings remain to each succeeding generation, as fresh as if it had witnessed their springing into existence. They take no date.
Something of this is common to all essential poetry--
"Vivuntque commissi calores Æoliæ fidibus puellæ."
The loves of Sappho _live_. They have not passed away. They _are_ immortally. Therefore the Poet, as we said, is the giver of fame. His praise--his scorn--lives for ever.
All who are worthy to read Us know how well the rude primeval people comprehended the worth of the poet. The song rang to the borders of the land or of the name, and that was glory or ignominy alive in every heart. Honour given by the poet was then a substantial possession; to be disgraced by his biting vituperation was like the infliction of a legal punishment. The whole condition of things--men's minds and their outward relations--corresponded to that which seems now to us an extraordinary procedure--that of constituting the poet, in virtue of that name, a state functionary, holding office, rank, and power. Now, the poet is but a self-constituted Censor. He holds office from the Muse only; or upon occasion from the mighty mother, Dulness. The Laureateship is the only office in the State of Poetry that is in the Queen's gift; and that, thanks to her benignity and the good sense of the nineteenth century, has become a sinecure conferred on an Emeritus.
"Hollo! my fancy, whether dost thou roam?"
Nay, she is not roaming at all--for we have been all along steering in the wind's eye right to a given point. We come now to say a few words of CHARLES CHURCHILL.
Of him it was said by one greater far, that he "blazed the meteor of a season." For four years--during life--his popularity--in London and the suburbs--was prodigious; for forty--and that is a long time after death--he was a choice classic in the libraries of aging or aged men of wit upon town; and now, that nearly a century has elapsed since he "from his horrid hair shook pestilence and war" o'er slaves and Scotsmen, tools and tyrants, peers, poetasters, priests, pimps, and players, his name is still something more than a mere dissyllable, and seems the shadow of the sound that Mother Dulness was wont to whisper in her children's ears when fretting wakefully on her neglected breasts. The Satirist, of all poets, calls the enquiry of the world upon himself. The Censor of manners should in his own be irreproachable. The satirist of a nation should feel that in that respect in which he censures he is whole and sound; that in assailing others he stands upon a rock; that his arrows cannot by a light shifting of the wind return to his own bosom. It was not so with Churchill. But he had his virtues--and he died young.