Puritan, Thomas Crispin, Merchant of Exeter, and endowed by him in 1670,
was the place where he commenced his education under the mastership of
John Morris. It is to be regretted that no roll of scholars earlier than
1830 is extant, so that we have to depend upon indirect though undoubted
evidence as to his connection with this school, but there are lively
legends of his school days preserved in the folk-lore of the district,
one of which is too characteristic to be omitted.
A certain cobbler whose shop was in the street leading to the Grammar
School, a man disliked by the boys, and specially so by young Wolcot,
was, to the amazement and horror of the whole township, reported to have
been cruelly murdered whilst sitting at his stall. The neighbours, on
looking in, were terror-stricken to find the man and his shop from floor
to ceiling bespattered with blood. The cobbler was certainly living, but
too terrified to speak of the nature of his wounds, his features being
covered with gore. He was not, however, seriously injured; indeed he was
much frightened and little hurt. What had happened was this. Young
Wolcot, whose threats of vengeance against the offender had been
somewhat mysterious for several days, had procured an old blunderbuss
from his father’s house and had duly charged it with powder, but instead
of shot had loaded it with _bullock’s blood_, and deliberately fired it
in the cobbler’s face; of course in one moment transforming the whole
appearance of things, and creating in the peaceful neighbourhood a great
sensation.
Such escapades no doubt made it desirable that he should change his
quarters, and he was presently transferred to the care of an uncle
practising as a surgeon at Fowey, in Cornwall. He attended the Grammar
School for awhile at Liskeard, and after that at Bodmin, under the
mastership of a clergyman named Fisher.
After this he spent one year in completion of his education in France
(1760). He failed to appreciate the French, and the dislike was quite
mutual. Of them he said in one of his odes:—
I hate the shrugging dogs,
I’ve lived among them, ate their frogs.
—_Coll. Works_, Vol. I., p. 107.
On his return to England he became his uncle’s pupil and medical student
for seven years. A reflection of his duties is cleverly given in one of
his lyrics, apparently addressed to Opie, his pupil in art:—
The lad who would a ’Pothecary shine,
Should powder Claws of Crabs and Jalap fine,
Keep the shop clean, and watch it like a Porter,
Learn to boil glysters—nay, to give them too,
If blinking nurses can’t the business do:
Write well the labels, and wipe well the Mortar.
—_Odes to Royal Academicians_, Ode iii., p. 8.
Drawing, painting, and classical reading seem, however, to have claimed
too much of his time, and his verse-making occupations were no doubt
hindrances to his professional progress, for in them he was quite
industrious, and from Fowey, in 1756, he sent his poem on the elder
“Pitt’s recovery from Gout” to _Martin’s Magazine_.
His apprenticeship over, he spent a short time in the medical schools of
London; then he returned to Devon, where Dr. Huxham, a celebrated
Plymouth physician, did him the good service of examining him as to his
competency in medicine and surgery, and recommended him to a northern
university—that of Aberdeen—for a degree by diploma, which he was
fortunate enough to get conferred upon him, receiving his M.D. in
September, 1767.
In the same year came an opportunity for foreign travel, of which he
eagerly availed himself. Sir William Trelawney, a connection of the
family on his mother’s side, and a patient of his uncle’s in Cornwall,
was that same year appointed Governor of the island of Jamaica, and
taking young Wolcot with him, in a short time made the new-fledged
doctor Physician General to the Forces in the island.
Whilst there, in 1769, the idea seems to have occurred to his patron
rather than to himself that if he could give his young friend nothing
more in the way of official promotion, there was yet the hopeful field
of Church preferment, which, in the West Indies, he was able to command.
The rich living of St. Ann’s, Jamaica, then enjoyed by an invalid
clergyman, was likely to be soon vacant by his demise. Sir William was
the patron, and without sufficient thought, as it seems to us, of
Wolcot’s unfitness for such a solemn responsibility, urged him to go at
once to England and qualify by ordination for the post.
This curious candidate for holy orders was actually ordained deacon on
June 24th, 1769, and the following day priest, but he did not on his
return secure the living of St. Ann’s, as the incumbent recovered his
health and lived on for years. He was, however, solaced by the inferior
living of Vere, a parish for which Wolcot procured the services of a
curate, himself continuing to reside in the Government House at Spanish
Town. The history of this transaction and the profanity of the language
in which it is recorded are alike scandalous.
“Go,” said Sir William, “and get japanned. You may safely say that you
have an inward call, for a hungry stomach can speak as loudly as a
hungry soul!” _O tempora, O mores!_ How very few persons ever imagine
Peter Pindar in clerical guise. Sir William Trelawney died, Wolcot
returned to England in company with his widow, who died on the voyage.
Once more in England, he showed his good sense by reverting, despite the
axiom “once a clerk always a clerk,” for his future occupation to
medicine, letters, or the fine arts, leaving the sacred office to
others.
As a medical man Peter Pindar was a modified failure at the best. He was
cordially disliked by his brother practitioners in the Truro district,
who in the end drove him out of it. His treatment of fever patients with
copious libations of cold water roused their wrath, and they utterly
despised the theory expressed in his own words that “a physician can do
little more than watch Dame Nature and give her a shove on the back when
he sees her inclined to do right.”
In letters he was far more successful, and was undoubtedly the most
popular satirical poet of the Georgian period. Whether he lampooned
individuals, or public bodies, the Royal Academicians, or Royalty
itself, his versatile genius displayed such a wide range of
accomplishments that he attracted hosts of readers, and his books
commanded a prodigious sale. All the world has read of the King’s visit
to Whitbread’s Brewery, and his wondering how the apples got into the
apple dumplings, and not a few readers have felt for Sir Joseph Banks,
James Boswell, and Benjamin West, as they came in turn under his
stinging lash.
His principal poems were issued from time to time as shilling or
half-crown pamphlets. They were written in irregular, rollicking metre,
the most important of them in the form of odes. In these he shines as a
critic of music, painting, and literature. In all these directions he
was, as he describes himself, “the most merciless Mohawk that ever
scalped.” By such an expression he puts himself out of court as a safe
and equitable judge. His appreciations of Wilson, of Gainsborough, of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of J. M. W. Turner, have been endorsed by the
foremost art writers of our time. Of Turner he said:—
Turner, whatever strikes thy mind,
Is painted well, and well designed.
Perhaps his least-known verses are those written for music and published
from Exeter in the time of Jackson, the Cathedral organist, who was
responsible for the airs to which they were sung. His own musical
accomplishments were undoubtedly varied and sound.
Dr. Wolcot had much of the Bohemian in his constitution. He lived in a
town where to this day a Puritan simplicity of manners marks the habits
of the middle-class people. Quakers, Baptists, and Independents of the
early Presbyterian type were numerous in the Kingsbridge of his day. If
the old barn to which he addressed some of his odes could speak, it
would tell of the visits of strolling players who, anathematised
elsewhere, but welcomed by Peter Pindar, were allowed there to perform
their bloodcurdling tragedies and questionable farces, to the scandal of
the “unco guid.” And besides all this, old Richard Stanley, the king of
the gipsies, grandfather of the present Romany patriarch of that name,
was welcomed year by year to a shake-down in the straw when he came
horse-dealing to Kingsbridge or to Dodbrooke Fair. Wolcot stoutly
maintained that he never lost an egg or a chicken by his hospitality to
the gipsies. We have heard the Bucklands, the Stanleys, and the Lees
speak of his memory as of one who was kind to their fathers, and we have
conversed with old people who have spoken of the building, which now
stands almost unaltered, as the only theatre in Kingsbridge. Its
interior is wonderfully like the picture of Hogarth’s called the
“Strolling Players.” The fact that Bamfield Moore Carew, the king of the
beggars, frequently lodged in it, adds historical interest to the
picturesque and venerable shanty.
Dr. Wolcot’s real kindness to John Opie, whom he discovered as a lad
working in a saw pit; his industrious endeavours to educate and refine
him; and his generous assumption of fullest responsibility for his
maintenance, together with his introduction of him to the world in
London, form a creditable chapter in his history which ought never to be
omitted from Peter’s life story. In Dugdale’s _British Traveller_ will
be found the copy of a written contract made by Opie in favour of his
patron and friend. It begins—
I promise to paint for Dr. Wolcot any picture or pictures he may
demand, as long as I live; otherwise I desire the world will consider
me as an ungrateful son of a ——. [The words are unquotable.]
Opie stood to this obligation, but always made his friend pay
eighteenpence for the canvas!
Opie is said to have paid great deference to Dr. Wolcot’s instructions.
Whilst that gentleman was painting, he would sometimes lean over him and
exclaim, “Ah! if I could ever paint like you!” to which Pindar replied,
“If I thought thou wouldst not exceed me, John, I would not take such
pains with thee.” For two years he never painted a single picture
without the judgment of his friend.
It was at the Doctor’s suggestion that his name was changed from Hoppy
to Opie, a name worn by a good family in Cornwall, and more likely to
attract favourable notice in London, whither they both went together in
1780, their joint expenses being supplied from one purse. Out of this
last circumstance grew a dispute and estrangement, never fully settled.
The communistic arrangement lasted for a short time only. One morning,
when Sir Joshua Reynolds was breakfasting with Wolcot and Opie, Sir
Joshua remarked of Opie, “Why, this boy begins his art where other
people leave off!” Very numerous are the portraits of his patron which
Opie has left behind, representing Pindar in different stages of his
career, most of them having been engraved and published in various
editions of his works, or in miscellanies containing contributions from
his pen.
If a watchful editor did not restrict us for space, we should have liked
to show how that facile pen of Peter’s could run on “from grave to gay,
and from lively to severe.” Perhaps there may be room for a sample of
each. We wish he had given us a little more of such quiet and pathetic
writing as
THE OLD SHEPHERD’S DOG.
The old shepherd’s dog like his master was gray,
His teeth all departed and feeble his tongue,
Yet where’er Corin went, he was followed by Tray;
Thus happy through life did they hobble along.
When fatigued on the grass the shepherd would lie
For a nap in the sun—’midst his labours so sweet,
His faithful companion crawled constantly nigh,
Plac’d his head on his lap or lay down at his feet.
When winter was heard on the hill and the plain,
And torrents descended and cold was the wind,
If Corin went forth ’midst the tempests and rain,
Tray scorned to be left in the chimney behind.
At length in the straw Tray made his last bed;
For vain against death is the stoutest endeavour—
To lick Corin’s hand, he rear’d up his weak head,
Then fell back, closed his eyes, and, ah! clos’d them for ever.
Not long after Tray did the shepherd remain,
Who oft o’er his grave in true sorrow would bend;
And when dying, thus feebly was heard the poor swain,
“Oh! bury me, neighbour, beside my old friend.”
Is not that a genuine piece of pure pastoral writing—grave and truthful?
Of his gay writing there is more than enough, and much of it is as unfit
for modern quotation as some of the classics in whom he delighted. As
Thomas Bewick could not be persuaded that anything he actually saw was
unsuited for pictorial representation, however vulgar, if the drawing
were true to nature, so Pindar shocks our sense of propriety continually
and without apology. He could, however, play on the whole gamut of the
soul’s passions, as witness his touching threnody on “Julia, or the
Victim of Love,” in his _Smiles and Tears_, a piece no man without a
tender heart could ever have written.
Many jocular little pieces like the following are strewn among his
verses:—
=ODE (_Introductory_).=
Simplicity, I dote upon thy tongue;
And thee, O white-rob’d _Truth_, I’ve reverenced long—
I’m fond too of that flashy varlet wit,
Who skims earth, sea, heav’n, hell, existence o’er
To put the merry table in a roar,
And shake the sides with laugh-convulsing fit.
O yes! in sweet simplicity I glory—
To _her_ we owe a charming little story.
=WILLIAM PENN, NATHAN, AND THE BAILIFF.=
A Tale.
As well as I can recollect,
It is a story of fam’d _William Penn_,
By bailiffs oft beset, without effect,
Like numbers of our Lords and Gentlemen.
William had got a private hole to spy
The folks who came with writs, or “How d’ye do?”
Possessing too a penetrating eye
Friends from his foes the Quaker quickly knew.
A bailiff in disguise, one day,
Though not disguised to our friend Will,
Came, to Will’s shoulder compliments to pay,
Concealed, the catchpole thought, with wondrous skill.
Boldly he knocked at William’s door,
Drest like a gentleman from top to toe,
Expecting quick admittance, to be sure,
But no!
WILL’S servant NATHAN, with a strait-hair’d head
Unto the window gravely stalked, not _ran_.
“Master at home?” the Bailiff sweetly said—
“Thou canst not speak to him,” replied the man.
“What,” quoth the Bailiff, “won’t he see me then?”
“Nay,” snuffled Nathan, “let it not thus strike thee;
Know, verily, that WILLIAM PENN
_Hath seen_ thee, but he doth not _like_ thee.”
A Kingsbridge gentleman having recently come across the original
manuscript of one of the characteristic pieces written by Peter Pindar,
has kindly allowed its publication. It will be seen that the rhyme
describes in his forceful and not over polite style the outcome of a
magistrates’ meeting at Morleigh after the passing of the law against
poaching. It is in the Devonshire dialect:—
=EPISTLE.=
From Deggony Dolt, farmer, of Stanborough; to John Tolt, waggoner, of
Clannaborough.
Lord Jan! hast thee heer’d that at leet Morleigh Town,
Where Just Asses often rag w——e, rogue and clown,
A learge drove of Passons and Tomies and Squires
Met lately to ruin the Poachers and Buyers?
How vierce and how vine they came scampering in,
Zome dreiving, zome riding, zome vat and zome thin;
This mounted on Pony and that Rozinante,
Zome Galloways shodded, zome whisky, zome jaunty.
Mum Doubtful, Tom Guzzle, Jack Jaw, and Ned Tilly,
Dick Doubty, Jan Numskull, and Blockheaded Billy,
Jan Clod from the vield, Janny Jumps from the Shop,
His father sells Incle, woll buy and woll zwop;
Young Nincompoop Simpkins, the son of Jan Huffer,
Wat Windy, Soft Stephen, and Peter the Puffer,
Like mazed men were eager their plans to express,
Tho’ as to their reasons they cou’d not be less,
Where brains are but little and Tyranny’s found
Much bother and bluster most times do abound.
Our Squires of those yet but a few by the bye
War zich; as to their others, that’s all in my eye,
Our Squires and Parsons and limbs of the Law
Determined strong rules and resolves for to draw,
And then in the Papers the whole advertise,
Sure most as they thaut you’d be acting more wise,
All Game must in future to none else belong,
Their Rerts were so clear, their powers so strong.
To dinner they went, where they grinned and they sneer’d;
The Bottle pushed round till with drink their eyes glared,
All speakers at once, nort but d—m—ie was plain,
Ev’n Parsons took roundly the Lord’s name in vain;
The Reckoning discharged yet at this zome looked bluff,
And grudged the expense tho’ ’twas reasonable enough;
Zome gallopped away, zome halted at ease,
Zome mounted their ponies and two wheeled post chaise.
Not far howsomever went Mum Doubtful ’twas zed
When he tumbled and luckily valled on his head;
Tom Guzzle over zit in a Ditch on the road,
And eased his gorged Stomach of part of its load.
Jan Clod lodged his bones where bars grow in clumps,
And under a hen roost sprawled leet Janny Jumps,
Reversed lay Soft Staphen his heels only zeed,
The rest was concealed in the Briers and Weed;
Here plunged in a Buddle roll’d Parson Jack Daw,
There bald pate Dick Doubty was emptying his Maw,
Wat Windy proceeded, but at length came to ground,
Zome say that his nose in a Cow Dung was found;
But Nort’s ne’er in danger who’s born to be hung,
Will never meet death till on gallows he’s slung.
Jan Numscull, a Mushroom that’s lately arose,
Now stretched on a Dunghill had fuming repose;
Young Nincompoop Simpkin lay speechless hard by,
A large Dap of Cow Dung had closed his left eye,
And Peter the Puffer, he could not tell how,
In spite of his boasting rode into a slough,
While snug in a hogstie got Parson Ned Tilly,
And under a Vuz bush snored Blockheaded Billy,
Thus ended the meeting that made Poachers tremble.
The next thee shall hear when again they assemble.
The late Rev. Treasurer Hawker, M.A., in his sketch of Wolcot, written
for the Devonshire Association in 1877 and published in their
_Transactions_, describes most accurately Pindar’s very humorous account
of George the Third’s visit to Exeter in _Brother Jan’s Epistle to
Zester Naw_. He says:—
The humour is irresistible. It is impossible not to laugh.... There is
a rollicking swing about the description which keeps the whole
narrative going like the steady onward pace of a racing eight-oar, or
the _vis vivida_ of a fast four-horse coach.
He quotes these stanzas as characteristic alike of the humour and the
dialect. Introducing the Royal entry:—
Well, in a come _King George_ to town
With doust and zweat as nutmeg brown,
The hosses all in smoke:
Huzzain, trumpetin, and dringin,
Red colours vleein, roarin, zingin,
So mad seemed all the voke.
The King was not entertained at the Palace, but was sent to the Dean.
Peter says:—
Becaze the Bishop sent mun word
_A hadn’t got the means_.
A could not meat and drink afford.
Peter affected to have heard the King’s remarks about the cathedral:—
Zo, said, “Neat, neat; clean, very clean;
D’ye mop it, mop it, Measter Dean,
Mop, mop it every week?”
The unhappy reference of Farmer Tab to the King’s mental condition,
though concealed by his dialect, was simply cruel, and, of course, was
carefully preserved by Peter:—
And, Varmer Tab, I understand,
Drode his legs vore and catched the hand
And shaked wey might and main.
“I’m glad your Medjesty to zee,
And hope your Medjesty,” quoth he,
“Wull ne’er be _mazed_ again.”
The King is befogged by the Devonshire word:—
“Maz’d, maz’d, what’s maz’d,” then said the King,
“I never heerd of zich a thing.
What’s maz’d, what, what, my lord?”
“Hem,” zed my lord, and blow’d his nose,
“Hem, hem, sir, ’tis, I do suppose,
Sir, an old Devonshire word.”
Jan Ploughshare is made to say in a later stanza that he has found
royalty so disappointing a show that when he gets home to Moreton and
reads his Bible he shall for the future “skep the books of Kings.”
The late Rev. Treasurer Hawker further says:—
Kingsbridge may point with some degree of pride to her son’s sturdy
independence, his dislike of jobbery and shams, his refusal to be
blinded or muzzled in his denunciation of abuses by any powerful
position or high rank.... Wolcot was a bad, sensual, vindictive man,
yet a certain respect must, I think, be paid to one who in an age
inclined to toadyism of big people, did not shrink from confronting
the false idols of the day, even if sometimes he toppled them over
with undue violence and contempt.—(Sketch of Wolcot read at
Kingsbridge, July, 1887. _Transact. Devon. Association._)
A writer in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ gives this most accurate
appreciation:—
Wolcot’s humour was broad, and he cared little whether he hit above or
below the belt, but he had a keen eye for the ridiculous, and was
endowed with a wondrous facility of diction.
The same writer truly says that many of his serious pieces were marked
by taste and feeling, and his translation of Thomas Warton’s Latin
epigram on sleep dwells in the memory through its happy simplicity.
The story is told of the bargain which he made with the London
publishers, who, hearing that he proposed to sell his copyrights, told
off one of their representatives to negotiate with him. The agent found
the old Doctor quite ready for him, sitting up in bed with a fine
churchyard cough in splendid development, and with a side-table
furnished with an impressive array of medicines. At first a sum was
offered which Peter considered contemptibly small. He asked at once a
payment of some three hundred pounds a year, and amidst much painful
coughing managed to say, “I shall not live, I know, to enjoy it long, as
you may see, so there is no excuse for meanness in my case.” The agent
was quite impressed by the scene, and the bargain was closed for two
hundred and fifty pounds yearly for his life, with the condition that
all future writing was to be for them alone. This was in 1795, and to
the chagrin of his publishers he displayed the vitality so often seen in
annuitants, and actually lived on for nearly a quarter of a century to
enjoy their reluctant generosity.
His minor poems are oftener quoted because they are freer from
objectionable matter. _The Razor Seller_, and _The Pilgrim and the Peas_
are well known, and have been used as recitations, but his longer odes
and letters had more than a passing notice, they were so strong in their
satire, and so numerous as to have affected public opinion. The very
Government were alarmed and pressed upon him a pension as a means of
preventing further onslaughts upon the foibles and peculiarities of the
king. Some preliminary payments were actually received by him, and all
was at one time apparently settled in his favour when he suddenly
returned the monies paid him, objecting to the conditions of silence and
declining all further favours.
Cruel to the peculiarities of others, he was most sensitive himself to
criticism, and hungry for praise, as he admits in an appeal to his
reviewers:—
I am no cormorant for fame, d’ye see;
I ask not _all_ the laurel, but a _sprig_!
Then hear me, Guardians of the sacred Tree,
And stick a leaf or two about my wig.
In sonnet, ode, and legendary tale,
Soon will the press my tuneful works display;
Then do not damn ’em, and prevent the sale;
And your petitioner shall ever pray.
It must have been hateful to him to have found at last, in Gifford, the
scholar and critic who attacked him in the anti-Jacobin magazine in an
article entitled “Nil admirari, etc.,” a foeman whose satire was as
strong as his own. Gifford speaks of Peter Pindar as “this disgusting
subject, the prolific reviler of his Sovereign and impious blasphemer of
his God”; hard words for one to put up with, however clearly he may have
deserved them. Though his character is not exemplary, and cleverness
must not be allowed to atone for lack of moral sense, we do not wish to
paint him of too black a hue, if only for charity’s sake. Gifford’s
attack was strong and straight, and it may be doubted if Peter’s
reputation ever survived it. There was a common fight between these two
in which Peter came off worst. He deserved it, for he was the aggressor.
Discredited in the popular estimation, he lingered on for a while, and
though from 1811 to 1819 he was suffering from blindness and infirmity,
he dictated verses until within a few days of his death.