He was, in addition, a police magistrate at Westminster; and was as excellent on the bench as he was execrable in verse. When the office of Poet Laureate comes under discussion, Pye in the eighteenth century, and Alfred Austin in the present era, are inevitably bracketed together, for the purpose of showing to what depths of inanity a Poet Laureate can descend. But both these laurelled bards have been unjustly handled. To deliberately select the inferior versifier of the age and to make him Laureate is of itself a doubtful official service to a man; and then for critics to maliciously pick out his most feeble efforts by which to judge him and hold him up to contempt is cruel. It is something as though we were to appraise Tennyson by the _Skipping Rope_ (which is worse than any of Pye’s futilities) and to leave _Maud_ altogether out of account. Pye’s idea of poetry was at any rate a part of the habit of thought current at the time, and of the same order of flowery compliment as that of Thomson, who wrote _The Seasons_: although infinitely inferior in execution. Topographical description, interlarded with generous praise of his country-gentlemen neighbours, whose seats dotted the country he described: that was largely Pye’s idea of poetry; and not a vicious, if on the other hand not an inspired, view. Pye was not a man favoured by fortune. When his father died, he found himself heir indeed to the family estates, but they were encumbered with debts to the amount of £50,000; and soon afterwards the house was burned down. He sold the estates about 1785, from sheer inability to make head against his financial embarrassments; and Faringdon knew the Pyes no more. But Faringdon Clump, already mentioned, was planted by him before the family connection was thus severed, and still flourishes; while his poetry lies dead and forgotten by the world at large. His other chief work was the pulling down of that Faringdon House which had been besieged by his ancestor, and replacing it by a new residence. The large parish church, with curiously squat central tower, suffered greatly during those warlike operations of 1645-6. The spire, with which the tower was at that time surmounted, was destroyed, as also was the south transept; since rebuilt. Numerous monuments and brasses are to be found in this extensive Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular building. Prominent among these monuments is the fine alabaster altar-tomb of Sir Henry Unton, 1596, in the Unton Chapel. It was placed here by his widow, Dame Dorothy Unton, whose own effigy, in a kneeling attitude, was at the feet of that of her husband, until tactless “restorers” effected a very injudicious separation, and not only took her away from her husband, but out of the Unton Chapel, and placed her in that of the Pyes.