Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/199

The opportunity for a display of his skill in versifying came to him in 1784. Most of the wits of the day were ranged on the side of the Whigs, and they soon found subjects for their jests among the supporters of Pitt. A country squire who represented Devonshire in parliament made himself the object of satire by his ludicrous speeches in the house against Fox and on behalf of Mr. Pitt. This was John Rolle, a young man with large estates in and around the two watering-places of Exmouth and Sidmouth, who lived to be the old lord Rolle who stumbled at the steps of the throne in 1838 when paying homage to the young queen Victoria. His name gave the title to their chief satire which first appeared as "criticisms on the Rolliad, a poem, being a more faithful portraiture of the present immaculate young minister and his friends, than any extant." Edition after edition poured from the press and into the stream of satire, as it sped its course, flowed many tributary poems. By 1795 it had become "The Rolliad in two parts; probationary odes for the laureatship and poetical miscellanies." The jokes and allusions had their days of life but have now passed into the grave. No one reads these satires and if many did only a few would appreciate the points. Speculation was long excited over the authorship of these effusions and gradually, through the testimony of contemporary politicians, most of the pieces found their parents. Lord John Townshend was certainly the begetter of not a few of them. He wrote the "probationary ode for Major Scott" the dullard that Warren Hastings chose for his champion in Parliament, and the playful parody of Horace's "donec gratus eram tibi," as well as numerous odes to his political opponents, lords Barrington, Dartmouth, George Germaine and sir Elijah Impey. Perhaps the most popular of his productions was Jekyll, a political eclogue. The original draft, which bore the name of