if by the blast of the general hate
or scorn--

"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
AEoliae fidibus puellae."

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, poet