The Second Book opens with the attack on our Laureate versifier:
"While in the Camp retir'd both armies lay,
Some panting, others fearful of the day,
Eusden, a laurell'd Bard by fortune rais'd,
By very few been read, by fewer prais'd,
From place to place forlorn and breathless flies,
And offers bribes immense for strong allies.
In vain he spent the day—the night in vain,
For all the Laureate and his bribes disdain.
With heart dejected he return'd alone,
Upon the banks of Cham to make his moan,
Resolv'd to spend his future days in ease,
And only toil in verse himself to please;
To fly the noisy Candidates of Fame,
Nor ever court again so coy a Dame."
Eusden has not been spared in prose or verse. Oldmixon, who was in all probability chagrined at not being preferred to the Bays himself, speaks thus of him in his "Art of Logic and Rhetoric:" "That of all the galimatias he ever met with, none came up to the verses of this poet, which have as much of the Ridiculum and Fustian in them as can well be jumbled together, and are of that sort of nonsense which so perfectly confounds all ideas that there is no distinct one left in the mind." Again he tells us "that the putting the Laurel on the head of one who writ such verses, will give futurity a very lively idea of the judgment and justice of those who bestowed it."
The Duke of Buckingham made his appointment the subject of some amusing stanzas, called, in the third edition of that nobleman's works, published in 1740, "The Election of a Poet-Laureat," but better known as "The Session of the Poets." A few of the verses we must quote:
"A famous Assembly was summoned of late,
To crown a new Laureat came Phœbus in state,
With all that Montfaucon himself could desire,
His Bow, Laurel, Harp, and abundance of Fire.
