Eusden died at his rectory in Lincolnshire in 1730. Colley Cibber wore the laurel with unblushing front for twenty-seven years from that date. His annual birth-day and new-year odes for all that time are treasured in the _Gentleman's Magazine_. They are all so bad, that his friends pretended that he made them so on purpose. Dr Johnson, however, often asserted, from his personal knowledge of the man, that he took great pains with his lyrics, and thought them far superior to Pindar's. The Doctor was especially merry with one ultra-Pindaric flight which occurs in the Cibberian "Ode for the New-Year 1750." "Through ages past the muse preferr'd Her high-sung hero to the skies; Yet now reversed the rapture flies, And Caesar's fame sublimes the bard. _So on the towering eagle's wing The lowly linnet soars to sing._ Had her Pindar of old Known her Cæsar to sing, More rapid his raptures had roll'd; But never had Greece such a king!" So proud was Cibber of that marvellous image of the linnet and eagle, that he repeated it in the "Natal Ode for 1753." In his last "New-year Ode," too, 1757, he again scolds Pindar for his sluggishness-- "Had the lyrist of old Had our Cæsar to sing, More rapid his numbers had roll'd; But never had Greece such a king, No, never had Greece such a king!" Those effusions are truly incomparable. Not only are they all bad, but not one of them in twenty-seven years contains a good line. Yet he was, happily for himself, more impenetrable to the gibes of the wits than a buffalo to the stings of mosquitoes. Of the numerous epigrams twanged at him, here is one from the _London Magazine_ for 1737. "ON SEEING TOBACCO-PIPES LIT WITH ONE OF THE LAUREATE'S ODES. "While the soft song that warbles George's praise From pipe to pipe the living flame conveys, Critics who long have scorn'd must now admire, For who can say his ode now wants its fire?" Dr Johnson honoured him with another, equally complimentary to Cibber and his Cæsar. "Augustus still survives in Maro's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign; Great George's acts let tuneful Colley sing, For nature form'd the poet for the king." Yet Cibber, the hero of the Dunciad, was not a dunce, except in his attempts at verse; even Pope, who calls him "a _pert_ and _lively_ dunce," epithets rather incongruous, admits the merit of his "Careless Husband." His Apology for his own Life, too, is no mean performance; some passages in it are both judicious and eloquent, particularly his criticisms on Nokes and Betterton, and on acting in general. Though the most wretched of poetasters, he was an abler prose writer than half of his critics.