OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1764. English feeling which they shared, and their common cordial
MJ$6. hatred of the falsehoods and pretences of the world, was left
to be accomplished in the grave.* Be it not the least shame
of the profligate politics of these three disgraceful years, that,
arraying in bitter hostility one section of the kingdom against
the other, they turned into unscrupulous personal enemies
such men as these; made a patriot of Wilkes; statesmen of
Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Sandwich, and Bubb Dodington;
and, of the free and vigorous verse of Churchill, a mere
instrument of perishable faction. Not without reason on that
ground did Goldsmith condemn and scorn it. It was that
which had made it the rare mixture it so frequently is, of the
artificial with the natural and impulsive; which so fitfully
blended in its' author the wholly and the partly true ; which
impaired his force of style with prosaical weakness; and
controlled, by the necessities of partisan satire, his feeling for
nature and for truth. Yet should his critic and fellow-poet
have paused before, in this dedication to the Traveller, he
branded him as a writer of lampoons. To Charles Hanbury
Williams, but not to Charles Churchill, such epithets belong.
The senators who met to decide the fate of turbots were not
worthier of the wrath and the scourge of Juvenal, than the
men who, reeking from the gross indulgences of Medmenham-
abbey, drove out "William..Pitt from the cabinet, sat clown by
the side of Bute, denounced in the person of Wilkes their
own old profligate associate, and took the public morality
into keeping. Never, that he might merely fawn upon power
or trample upon weakness, had Churchill let loose his pen.
There was not a form of mean pretence or servile assump-
tion, which he did not use it to denounce. Low, pimping
* The present writer may here avow the authorship of an article on Churchill in
the Edinburgh Review (hood. 46-88), in which this view is taken in more detail.