Unknown as Rowe has proved to be to fame, he was blest with the respect of his contemporaries, which could not be said of his successor, Lawrence Eusden, then as well as now unknown to fame, and yet he wore the laureate wreath twelve years. Pope abused him in his “Dunciad,” Cooke in the “Battle of the Poets” has this couplet: “Eusden, a laurel’d bard by fortune raised, By very few was read, by fewer praised.” The rhetorician, Oldmixon, says he never met a poet with so much of the “ridiculum and fustian jumbled together, a sort of nonsense which so perfectly confounds all ideas that there is no distinct one left in the mind.” And yet the Georges I. and II. placed the laurel on his brow. George II., with characteristic misfortune, selected Colley Cibber, whom Pope made famous—I had almost said infamous—in these lines: “In merry Old England it once was a rule, The king had his poet, and also his fool, But now we’re so frugal, I’d have you to know it, That Cibber can serve both for fool and for poet.” His father, Caius Gabriel Cibber, an artist, sculptured the statues of two lunatics over the gates of Bedlam hospital. Although the artistic work was creditable, Pope made the father’s hand the medium of a savage attack on the son in the first book of the “Dunciad,” which was written for the purpose of making Eusden and Cibber, the laureates of George II., ridiculous. He thus introduces them as dunces: “Still Dunce the Second reigns like Dunce the First.” And thus he makes the father’s art serve his wicked purpose: “Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne, When o’er the gates, by his famed father’s hand, Great Cibber’s brazen, brainless brothers stand.” His only literary work that has endured even in the knowledge of scholars was an admirable autobiography which would have honored his name had he the wit to let poetry alone. Eusden and Cibber succeeded in one thing, they made the position of laureate thoroughly undesirable, so that when upon the latter’s death it was offered the author of the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” Thomas Gray promptly declined it, but William Whitehead accepted, serving during the excitement preceding and attending the American Revolution. He became at once the target for the shafts of satire aimed by his fellow poets, Churchill endeavoring to persecute him as Pope had his predecessors. But Whitehead had the rare grace to bear all attacks in silence, living as comfortable and happy a life as though there had been no satirical buzzing. He knew he was not brilliant, and did not propose to make himself miserable over it. Churchill might rasp him as caustically as he chose, he would lose neither sleep nor peace of mind in consequence, and this sublime indifference ultimately silenced all critics, permitting him to enjoy thirty years of self-satisfied service.