lent and ingenuity it
displays, not now perusable without an accompanying feeling akin to
contempt.

"GOTHAM" is an irregular, poetical whim, of which it is easier to describe
the procedure than to assign the reasonable purpose. Gotham itself is a
country unknown to our geographers, which Churchill has discovered, and of
which, in right of that discovery, he assumes the sovereignty under his
own undisguised name, King Churchill. After spiritedly arraigning the
exercise in the real world of that right by which he rules in his
imaginary kingdom--a right which establishes the civilised in the lands of
the enslaved or expatriated uncivilised, he spends the rest of his first
canto in summoning all creatures, rational and irrational, to join the
happy Gothamites in the universal choral celebration of his mounting the
throne. The second canto, for some two hundred verses, insists upon the
necessity of marrying Sense with Art, to produce good writing, and
Learning with Humanity, to produce useful writing; and then turns off
bitterly to characterise the reigns in succession of the Stuarts, by way
of warning to his Gothamites against the temptation to admit a vagrant
Stuart for their king. The third canto delivers the rules by which he,
King Churchill, who purposes being the father of his people, designs to
govern his own reign. That is all. What and where is Gotham? What is the
meaning of this royalty with which the poet invests himself? What is the
drift, scope, and unity of the poem? Gotham is not, and is, England. It is
not England, for he tells us in the poem that he is born in England, and
that he is not born in Gotham; besides which, he expressly distinguishes
the two countries by admonishing the Gothamites to search "England's fair
records," for the sake of imbibing a due hatred for the House of Stuart.
It is England, for it is an island which "Freedom's pile, by ancient
wisdom raised, adorns," making it great and glorious, feared abroad and
happy at home, secure from force or fraud. Moreover, her merchants are
princes. The conclusion is, that Gotham is England herself, poetically
disidentified by a very thin and transparent disguise. The sovereignty of
King Churchill, if it mean any thing capable of being said in prose, may
shadow the influence and authority which a single mind, assuming to itself
an inborn call to ascendancy, wishes and hopes to possess over the
intelligence of its own compatriot nation; and this may be