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XXI. Whig Panegyric Verse, 1700-1760

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

C. A. Moore
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Extract

Though of slight intrinsic value, Whig poetry of the eighteenth century constitutes a distinct chapter in the history of English literature. The earlier interest of poetry relating to affairs of state had almost invariably taken the form of personal eulogy, satire, or violent invective—types produced in extraordinary abundance during the Restoration. While such verse continued to flourish indefinitely, the complete development of the party system of government enabled poetry to acquire a much broader and more influential sphere. The great body of Whig verse written in the eighteenth century is devoted to the expression of party ideals; it is concerned with principles rather than personalities. This change of function, deeply significant for the future relation of politics and belles lettres, arose largely from the fact that poets were irresistibly attracted by what Chevrillon calls the psychology of Whiggism. Fortunately for the Whig cause, the versifiers contrived to find in the Whig dogma the political embodiment of the most popular moral sentiments of the age. The advocacy of Whiggism thus became a phase of a sentimental movement which, beginning early in the century, eventually “spread like a mildew over the whole surface of literature.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 1926 , pp. 362 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1926

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References

1 W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, Vol. V, ch. ii.

2 See C. B. Roylance Kent, The Early History of the Tories, 1908, ch. v

4 Similar sentiments are expressed in Congreve's To the Right Honourable the Earl of Godolphin. For fulsome eulogy of the Queen, compare Samuel Cobb's The Female Reign (1709).

5 A Poem, On the Late Glorious Successes …. Humbly Inscribed to the Lord Treasurer Godolphin (1707). Compare Charles Gildon's Libertas Triumphans (1708). The Whig enthusiasm of Rowe's Tamerlane (1702) was such that until 1815 it was played annually on November 5, the anniversary of William Ill's landing. The Revolution is glorified also in the Prologue to Rowe's Lady Jane Grey (1715).

6 Parts IV and V are devoted to Britain. See also The Castle of Indolence, Canto II, stz. xxiv. Compare with Thomson's tributes: Lord Lyttelton's To the Reverend Dr. Ayscough at Oxford. Written from Paris (1728) and To Mr. Glover on his Poem of Leonidas (1737); Robert Nugent's Epistle to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Cornbury and Ode to Mankind (1739); H. Walpole's Epistle from Florence to Thomas Ashton (1740); Henry Fielding's Liberty. To George Lyttelton, Esq. (1743); Mark Akenside's The Pleasures of the Imagination, Bk. II (1744) ; Gloster Ridley's Jovi Eleutherio, or, An Offering to Liberty (1745); Sir James Marriott's Verses on the Peace (1748); Joseph Warton's Verses Written at Montaubon (1750); Joseph Giles's Ode to the New Year (1756); and Thomas Newcomb's Vindicta Britannica (1758). Compare also Spectator 287.

7 Part V, 6, 81-2.

8 Young's loyalty is partly explained by these verses:

My breast, O Walpole, glows with grateful fire,

The streams of royal bounty, turn'd by thee,

Refresh the dry domains of poesy.

9 Compare Spectator 69 (1711) by Addison; Free-Thinker Vol. II, No. 152, Sept. 14, 1719; Steele's Conscious Lovers (1722), Act IV, sc. 2, Act V, sc. 1; Lillo's George Barnwell (1731), Act I, sc. 1, Act III, sc. 1 and Fatal Curiosity (1737), Act III, sc. 1; Lord Lyttelton's Letters from a Persian (1735) No. XLVIII. Voltaire remarks with surprise in Lettres Philosophiques, Lettre X, that younger sons of noble English families do not disdain to engage in commercial pursuits. César de Saussure makes the same observation in his Lettres, No. VIII, May 29, 1727. Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois praises the national enthusiasm for trade (Bk. V, ch. vi; Bk. XX, ch. vii, xii), but deplores the participation of the nobility (Bk. XX, ch. xxi).

10 Thomson dedicated his poem on Sir Isaac Newton to Walpole, who is described as “like Heaven, dispensing happiness to the discontented and ungrateful”; but he later withdrew the dedication and opposed the Prime Minister (see Britannia). In addition to passages cited here in various connections, note Young's Ocean: An Ode (1728), The Sea-Piece (1733) and Thomson's Summer, 1005-12, Autumn, 118-33, Liberty, Part IV, 423-50, 569-73. See Hans Marcus, “Die Entstehung von ‘Rule Britannia’,” etc., Anglia Beiblatt xxxv (1924), 306 ff.

11 That Prior's business in France was not a close secret is evident from the broadside An Excellent New Song, called Mat's Peace, or the Downfal of Trade. To the Good Old Tune of Green-Sleeves (1711) (Br. Mus. Broadside 1876 f. 1 (59)).

12 For other references to trade, see Fables, “The Man, the Cat, and the Fly,” and Epistle I. To a Lady. Occasioned by the Arrival of Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.

13 Compare Nicholas Tucker's A New Poem, etc. (1713) and M. Smith's On the Peace: A Poem. Dr. Johnson makes the following comment upon the surprising fact that Addison's friend Tickell composed a eulogistic poem On the Prospect of Peace: “How far Tickell, whom Swift afterwards mentioned as Whiggismus, had then connected himself with any party, I know not; this poem certainly did not flatter the practices, or promote the opinions, of the man by whom he was afterwards befriended. Mr. Addison, however he hated the men then in power, suffered his friendship to prevail over his public spirit, and gave in the Spectator such praises of Tickell's poem, that when …. I laid hold on it …. I thought it unequal to the honours which it had received…..” (Life of Tickell, Chalmers, English Poets, XI, 97-8). Tickell's Whig sympathies are expressed in The Royal Progress, praising George I, and An Epistle from a Lady in England to a Gentleman at Avignon, defending the Hanoverian succession. This latter, says Johnson, “stands high among party-poems; it expresses contempt without coarseness, and superiority without insolence.” (Ibid. 99) It relates, however, only to the Whig Act of Settlement (1701), and Johnson imself was not a Jacobite. Young's Lansdowne is as difficult to explain as Tickell's poem.

14 Imperium Pelagi.

15 Savage's eulogy of colonization was a new note. He is praised in Johnson's Life for having expatiated “upon a kind of beneficence not yet celebrated by any eminent poet, though it now appears more susceptible of embellishments, more adapted to exalt the ideas, and affect the passions, than many of those which have hitherto been thought worthy of the ornaments of verse.” (Chalmers, XI, 277.) Savage pays other tributes to commerce in The Wanderer, Canto I, An Epistle to Sir Robert Walpole, and The Volunteer Laureat, No. III.

16 Britannia, 218-27; 243-7. Compare Autumn, 910-28.

17 Review, Vol. I, 83-4, 100-1; Vol. II, 10, 18; Vol. III, 9, 13-16,92; Vol. IV, 3-16, 18-21, 23. See also Giving Alms No Charity, and Employing the Poor a Grievance to the Nation (1704). Addison has received much praise merely for repeating some of these arguments in Spectator 232.

18 See W. Cunningham, The Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times, 1912, Part I, ch. xv, especially pp. 501 ff., and L. W. Moffit, England on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution, 1925.

19 See W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, 1892, II, 209-11.

20 29 and 30 Car. II, c. 1. A Bill of 1689, which was finally defeated, contained among other curious proposals that all persons be compelled to wear woolen garments of native manufacture from Oct. 15 to Apr. 15. For a review of protective legislation by the Whigs after 1678 and the modifications made by Tory ministries, see C. B. Roylance Kent, op. cit., pp. 466-68; W. J. Ashley, Surveys Historic and Economic, 1900, pp. 268-303; W. Cunningham, loc. cit. A singular provision of the law required all corpses to be buried in woolen shrouds. Evidently it was not strictly enforced; John Dunton remarks in his Mourning-Ring, 1692, p. 288, that the late Act of Parliament is sometimes observed. It seems to have been applied more rigorously in the eighteenth century. The estate of John Byrom was fined five pounds for non-compliance (D.N.B.). Pope's reference to the case of Mrs. Oldfield, in Moral Epistles, Ep. I (1733), is well known. The Englishman's worship of wool is discussed at length in Henri Misson's Mémoires et Observations, 1698, pp. 129-44. For other references, see John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne, 1911, pp. 36-38. The rise of Free Trade among Tories is discussed by Kent, pp. 469-70 and Ashley, loc. cit. The fact that Walpole was somewhat less rigorous than most of his party (J. M. Robertson, Free Trade, 1919, p. 16; Cambridge Modern History, Vol. VI, ch. ii) was a Whig grievance.

21 11 and 12 Wm. III. c. 10.

22 7 Geo. I. c. 7.

23 A detailed account of “The Cambric Act” is given in the British Magazine March, 1749.

24 See Mist's Weekly Journal Aug. 15, 1719, May 7, 1720. The issue for March 11, 1721 reports the celebration occasioned by the passage of the bill. Accounts of riots are given in Read's Weekly Journal March 19, April 9, and June 11, 1720 and in Mercurius Politicus May, 1720, p. 32. Read's for Nov. 7, 1719 prints “The Weavers' Complaint against the Callico Madames, as sung at the Playhouse in Lincoln's Inn Fields.” The controversy engaged numerous pamphleteers. Steele contributed The Spinster, in defence of the Woollen Manufacturers, Dec. 19, 1719 and The Female Manufacturers Complaint Jan. 1719-20. Defoe, already the author of various tracts for the encouragement of the woolen industry, wrote for this special occasion A Brief State of the Question Between the Printed and Painted Callicoes and the Woollen and the Silk Manufacture (1719) and The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers Truly Represented (1719). John Asgill replied with A Brief Answer to a Brief State of the Question, etc. (1719), to the second edition of which (1720) was added an Appendix upon Steele's Spinster. For further details, see the Spinster, Dublin, 1790, G. A. Aitken's Life of Sir Richard Steele, 1889, II, 206-8, and M. Dorothy George's London Life in the XVIIIth Century, 1925, pp. 180ff. Mandeville had little sympathy for the distressed weavers; in the Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, ed. 1725,p. 358, he characteristically holds them responsible for their own miseries. It was easier to secure patronage of the silk industry than of the woolen. César de Saussure wrote from England May 29, 1727, “Very few women wear woollen gowns. Even servant-maids wear silks on Sundays and holidays, when they are almost as well dressed as their mistresses” (Letters tr. and ed. by Mme. Van Muyden, 1902, No. VIII).

25 To the long-conceal'd First Promoter of the Cambrick and Tea-Bills: an Epistle …. London, 1746. The philanthropist addressed is Stephen G. Jansen. Lockman comes in for deserved ridicule in Smollett's Advice: a Satire.

26 The author's note is that “above 130 handicrafts are employed in the manufacture of our wool.”

27 Here the author adds: “France, besides plundering us of our wool, pours in upon us …. Wines, Brandies, Cambricks, Point Laces …. Teas. This drains us of our specie, supports the manufacture of our greatest enemy, and starves our own.”

28 Bk. II, 238-55.

29 The Fleece was praised highly by Akenside (who made some contributions to it), Wordsworth, and “Christopher North” (John Wilson); but time has vindicated Dr. Johnson's contemptuous remark that a man cannot “write poetically of serges and druggets” (Life, ed. Hill, II, 453). Of Grainger's poem he exclaimed, “What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the ‘Parsley-bed, a Poem’; or ‘The Cabbage-garden, a Poem’….. You know there is already ‘The Hop-Garden, a Poem’ ; and, I think, one could say a great deal about cabbage.” (Ibid, 454.) Much of Dyer's poem is a mere versification of ideas presented in such typical works as Joshua Gee's Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered (1729); The Golden Fleece (1736); “John London's” Some Considerations on the Importance of the Woollen Manufacture (1740); William Webster's Consequences of Trade …. of The woollen trade in particular (1740); A short Essay upon Trade in general, more particularly on the Woollen Manufactures (1741); A treatise on trade; or, the antiquity and honour of commerce (1750); John Smith's Chronicon Rusticum-Commerciale; or, Memoirs of Wool, 2 vols. (1747; rev. 1757).

30 Bk. I, 146-51.

31 Bk. II, 476-80.

32 Bk. II, 20-22.

33 Bk. II, 86-94.

34 Bk. II, 250-58.

35 Bk. II, 522-36. Ralph Thoresby notes in his remarks upon the customs of Leicester that “the feast of St. Blase, a Bishop, is celebrated yearly about Candelmas by those who deal in wool, he being said to be the first who invented the combing thereof.” Diary, Oct. 28, 1712, Hunter's ed., II, 166.

36 Much statistical information for the early period is provided by Charles D'Avenant's Account of the rise and progress of our trade to Africa, preceding the year 1697, Works, 1771, V, 83 ff. See also Lecky, supra, II, 242 ff.

37 The Second Discourse concerning the Affairs of Scotland; written in the year 1698. Compare Francis Hutcheson's A System of Moral Philosophy, 1755, II, 201 ff.

38 J. R. Spears, The American Slave Trade, 1901, p. 95.

39 Letter of Dec. 6, 1748, Works, II, 208. Cited, with other references, by E. M. North, Early Methodist Philanthropy, 1914, pp. 94-5.

40 De Legibus Naturae (1672), tr. by J. Maxwell (1727), ch. ix, §11, cites approvingly Hobbes's De Cive, ch. ii, §9; ch. viii, §§3, 9.

41 Bk. II, ch. i, §85.

42 James Foster pronounced against slavery in his Discourses on all the principal Branches of Natural Religion and Social Virtue (1749-52), II, 156. A similar position is taken by Francis Hutcheson in A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), I, 299-302 and by George Wallace in A System of the Principles of the Law of Scotland (1760), I, 88-98.. Extracts from these writers were included in an Appendix to the American abolitionist Anthony Benezet's Some Historical Account of Guinea, etc. (1762).

43 The Negro's and Indian's Advocate, sueing for their Admission into the Church; or A persuasive to the instructing and baptizing the Negros and Indians in our Plantations. Shewing that as the complying therewith can be no prejudice to any man's just interest; so the wilful neglecting and opposing of it, is no less than a manifest Apostasie from the Christian faith, etc. (T.C. I, 366, Nov., 1679); Trade prefer'd before Religion and Christ made to give place to Mammon. Reprehended in a Sermon relating to the Plantations. First preached at Westminster Abbey, etc. (T.C. II, 135, June, 1685). Godwin is praised for his humanity by Anthony Benezet, op. cit., ed. 1771, p. 74. Baxter's counsel, ni The Christian Directory, Part II, ch. xiv, was widely influential in England and America; it is a plea for Christian behavior towards slaves.

44 Note the flippancy of the Epilogue written for Southerne's Oroonoko by Congreve. The most celebrated performance of this play was given in 1749 during the visit of a young African prince and his companion who had been redeemed from slavery by the government. The Gentleman's Magazine for February, 1749 (XIX, 89-90) gives an elaborate account of the occasion, concluding: “They appear sometimes at the theatres, and particularly on the 1st inst. were at Covent Garden to see the tragedy of Oroonoko. They were received with a loud clap of applause, which they acknowledged with a very genteel bow, and took their seats in a box. The seeing persons of their own colour on the stage, apparently in the same distress from which they had been so lately delivered, the tender interview between Imoinda and Oroonoko, who was betrayed by the treachery of a captain [as they had been], his account of his sufferings, and the repeated abuse of his placability and confidence, strongly affected them with that generous grief which pure nature always feels, and which art had not yet taught them to suppress; the young prince was so far overcome that he was obliged to retire at the end of the fourth act. His companion remained, but wept the whole time; a circumstance which affected the audience yet more than the play, and doubled the tears which were shed for Oroonoko and Imoinda.”

45 Vol. VIII, No. 30 (1691).

46 The Athenian Oracle, 1704, I, 529-32. Rptd. at Boston, Massachusetts in 1705 with Samuel Sewall's The Selling of Joseph and also in John Hepburn's American Defence of the Christian Golden Rule (1714). See Mary S. Locke, Anti-Slavery in America, 1901, pp. 18, 33.

47 Professor F. B. Kaye lists this poem, the preface to which is signed “B.M.,” among Mandeville's “Doubtful Works” but adduces good evidence for attributing it to him (“The Writings of Bernard Mandeville,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology for 1921, XX, 446-7; The Fable of the Bees, 1924, I, xxxi). A view similar to Mandeville's had been expressed in Anthony Hill's Afer Baptizatus : or the Negro turn'd Christian, being a Discourse showing, I. The Necessity of Instructing and Baptizing Slaves in English Plantations. II. The Folly of that Vulgar Opinion, that Slaves do cease to be Slaves when once Baptized (1702). That this “vulgar opinion” persisted is evident from Sarah Fielding's David Simple (1744), ed. 1904, p. 147. John Wesley notes an exception in his Journal for August 2, 1736; but compare what is said in entries for July 3, 1736, April 23, 1737, and July 27, 1755.

48 The provisions were explained to the public in The Assiento; or, Contract for Allowing to the Subjects of Great Britain the Liberty of Importing Negroes into the Spanish America, etc. (1713) and The Assiento Contract Considered …. In several Letters to a Member of Parliament (1714).

49 Meanwhile Defoe had become absorbed in the commercial advantages of the trade. Proposals for better organization are made in his Review, V, 40 (February, 1709); VII (1710), 34, 38, 40, 42, 46, etc. Various pamphlets of his on the same subject are listed by W. P. Trent, Cambridge Hist. of Eng. Lit., Vol. IX, Bibl. for ch. i.

50 Imperium Pelagi, Strain V.

51 Summer, 1019-20.

52 Windsor Forest, 408-12; Essay on Man, Ep. I, 107-8. The first of these passages was inscribed in the frontispiece of the Gentleman's Magazine for 1756.

53 Dodd's poem, The African prince, now in England, to Zara at her father's court, was printed in the Gentleman's Magazine July 1749, p. 323, and the companion-piece, Zara, at the Court of Annamabboe, to the African prince, now in England, August, p. 372. In the same year was published The Royal African, or memoirs of the young Prince of Annamboe, his condition while a slave in Barbadoes, his reception in England, etc.

54 The Fleece, Bk. IV, 189-209. Barbadoes, a poem, by Mr. Weeks (1754), expressing the same sentiment, is highly applauded for its humanity in the Monthly Review, XI, 325 (1754). Dyer is eulogized for the same reason, XVI, 337 (1757).

55 Sugar-Cane, Bk. IV, 234-43.

56 Evidence of a growing interest may be seen in periodical literature; but it is slight, and hardly begins before the reign of George II. See Grub-Street Journal Sept. 17, 1730. The Prompter No. 18, January 10, 1735, published what purported to be “The Speech of Moses Bon Saam, a Feee Negro, to the revolted Slaves in one of the most considerable Colonies of the West Indies,” an indignant protest against the treatment of slaves. This was reprinted in the Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1735 (V, 21); a defense of the colonists was made in the number for February (p. 91). Interest was again aroused momentarily by the request of the Georgia colonists at Savannah in 1739 for an alteration of their charter which would permit the introduction of slaves. (Ibid., January, 1741, XI, 30.) See also issues for July, 1740, X, 341; March, 1741, XI, 145; April, 1741, p. 186; September, 1746, XVI, 479. Moral apathy was stirred occasionally by the exposure of extreme inhumanity, such as the report published in the Gentleman's, March, 1759 (XXIX, 101). Seldom, however, do the remonstrants seriously question the moral right to trade in slaves. Sir Hans Sloane's A Voyage, etc., 2 vols. (1707-25), though not written against slavery, provided later opponents excellent arguments in the description of punishments inflicted upon negroes.

57 The encouragement of trade and patriotism was carried to an amusing extent by the Prince and the Princess of Wales. In order to prevent a decline in the support of the laws for protecting home industries after the war had been concluded, they issued an order that no one should appear at their court wearing any of the forbidden imports. As a further stimulation to Whig fervor, they had their children give a public performance of Addison's Cato from time to time. (Robert Phillimore, Memoirs, etc., of Lord Lyttelton, 1845, II, 425.)

58 Free-Thinker, Vol. II, No. XXX, Oct. 17, 1718.

59 Britannia, 147-55, 182-90. An interesting curiosity of the same year is an anomynous tract entitled The English Cotejo; or, The Cruelties, Depredations, and Illicit Trade Charg'd upon the English in a Spanish Libel lately Published, Compared with the Murders, Robberies, Barbarities, and Clandestine Trade proved upon the Spaniards. By a Sufferer (1729). Richard Barfield's An Epistle to …. Chesterfield (1730) is a poem similar in tone to Thomson's Britannia.

60 Letter to the Countess of Marr, July, 1727.

61 Persian Letters, No. LVII.

62 Even Akenside, one of the warmest advocates of Whig political principles, admits in Ode IX of Book I (1744) that the preoccupation with trade had fostered a selfish fierceness in the national character. See, however, his Hymn to the Naiads (1746) and Ode I of Book II. John Brown's Estimate (1757) contains a severe denunciation of English commercialism. It provoked a heated reply from J. B., M.D., entitled A Vindication of Commerce and the Arts; proving that they are the Source of the Greatness, Power, Riches, and Populousness of a State (1758). Thomas Gray expressed great contempt for the Estimate, but applauded Brown's dissertation against trade (Letters ed. D. C. Tovey, No. CXXXIX, I, 329). Goldsmith retained the old Tory attitude. The Bee No. V, Nov. 3, 1759, observes that trade becomes a harmful influence whenever it supplies a nation with luxuries. In The Deserted Village he also holds commercial greed of the English responsible for the impoverishment and expatriation of the Irish peasants.

63 The most important have been collected by Milton Percival, Ph.D., in Political Ballads Illustrating the Administration of Sir Robert Walpole, Oxford Historical and Literary Studies, 1916. For attacks on Bolingbroke also, see XXIII, XLV.

64 With these may be compared the indictments against Spain and France as summarized in A Review of all that hath pass'd between the Courts of Gt. Britain and Spain, relating to Our Trade and Navigation from the Year 1721, to the Present Convention, etc. (1739) and Samuel Webber's A Short Account of our Woollen Manufactures, from the Peace of Ryswick to this Time. Shewing, their former flourishing, and their present Ruinous Condition; and that they always flourished when France could not get our Wool, but declined in proportion to the Quantities of Wool Exported to them, etc. (1739). Edward Philips made dramatic capital of the general excitement by bringing out his Britons, Strike Home; or, The Sailors Rehearsal, A Farce (1739) at the Theatre-Royal. Thomas Newcomb's On Richelieu's Barbarities, On the French Prisoners in England, and On the French Cruelty to English Prisoners are poems typical of many that appeared during the war.

65 First Letter on a Regicide Peace, Works, 1803, VIII, 145.