o was in a way the editor; Tickel, a descendant
of Addison's friend and a connection of the Sheridans; and another
Irishman named Fitzpatrick. The various "skits" of which the book or
series is composed show considerable literary skill, and there is a
non-political and extraneous interest in the fact that it contains some
_rondeaux_ believed to be the only, or almost the only, examples of that
form written in England between Cotton in the seventeenth century and
the revival of it not very many years ago. The fun is often very good
fun, and there is a lightness and brightness about the verse and
phrasing which had been little seen in English since Prior. But the tone
is purely personal; there are no principles at stake, and the book,
besides being pretty coarse in tone, is a sort of object lesson in the
merely intriguing style of politics which had become characteristic of
England under the great seventy years' reign of the Whigs.

Coarseness and personality, however, are in the _Rolliad_ refined and
high-minded in comparison with the work of "Peter Pindar," which has the
redeeming merit of being even funnier, with the defect of being much
more voluminous and unequal. John Wolcot was a Devonshire man, born in
May 1738 at Kingsbridge, or rather its suburb Dodbrooke, in Devonshire.
He was educated as a physician, and after practising some time at home
was taken by Sir William Trelawney to Jamaica. Here he took orders and
received a benefice; but when he returned to England after Trelawney's
death he practically unfrocked himself and resumed the cure of bodies.
Although he had dabbled both in letters and in art, it was not till 1782
that he made any name; and he did it then by the rather unexpected way
of writing poetical satires in the form of letters to the members of the
infant Royal Academy. From this he glided into satire of the political
kind, which, however, though he was a strong Whig and something more,
did not so much devote itself to the attack or support of either of the
great parties as to personal lampoons on the king, his family, and his
friends. Neither Charles the Second at the hands of Marvell, nor George
the Fourth at the hands of Moore, received anything like the steady fire
of lampoon which Wolcot for years poured upon the most harmless and
respectable of English monarchs. George the Third had indeed no
vices,--unless a certain parsimony may be dignified by that name,--but
he had many foibles of the kind