contemporaries who noticed it had
nothing better to give in the way of poetry proper than that which they
satirised. In fact, one of the chief of these satirists, Wolcot, has
left a considerable mass of not definitely satirical work which is
little if at all better than the productions of the authors he
lampooned.

This very remarkable body of satirical verse, which extends from the
_Rolliad_ and the early satires of Peter Pindar at the extreme beginning
of our present time to the _Pursuits of Literature_ and the
_Anti-Jacobin_ towards its close, was partly literary and partly
political, diverging indeed into other subjects, but keeping chiefly to
these two and intermixing them rather inextricably. The _Pursuits of
Literature_, though mainly devoted to the subject of its title, is also
to a great extent political; the _Rolliad_ and the _Probationary Odes_,
intensely political, were also to no small extent literary. The chief
examples were among the most popular literary productions of the time;
and though few of them except the selected _Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin_
are now read, almost all the major productions deserve reading. The
great defect of contemporary satire--that it becomes by mere lapse of
time unintelligible--is obviated to no small extent here by the crotchet
(rather fortunate, though sometimes a little tedious) which these
writers, almost without exception, had for elaborate annotation. Of the
chief of them, already indicated more than once by reference or
allusion, some account may be given.

_The Rolliad_ is the name generally given for shortness to a collection
of political satires originating in the great Westminster election of
1784, when Fox was the Whig candidate. It derived its name from a
Devonshire squire, Mr. Rolle, who was a great supporter of Pitt; and,
with the _Political Eclogues_, the mock _Probationary Odes_ for the
laureateship (vacant by Whitehead's death), and the _Political
Miscellanies_, which closed the series, was directed against the young
Prime Minister and his adherents by a knot of members of Brooks' Club,
who are identified rather by tradition and assertion than by positive
evidence. Sheridan, Tierney, Burgoyne, Lord John Townshend, Burke's
brother Richard, and other public men probably or certainly contributed,
as did Ellis--afterwards to figure so conspicuously in the same way on
the other side. But the chief writers were a certain Dr. Lawrence, a
great friend of Burke, wh