Glover was a man so remarkable as to be thought capable of having written
the letters of Junius, although no one now almost names his name or reads
his poetry. He was the son of a Hamburgh merchant in London, and born
(1712) in St Martin's Lane, Cannon Street. He was educated at a private
school in Surrey, but being designed for trade, was never sent to a
university, yet by his own exertions he became an excellent classical
scholar. At sixteen he wrote a poem to the memory of Sir Isaac Newton,
and at twenty-five produced nine books of his 'Leonidas.' Partly through
its own merits, partly through its liberal political sentiments, and
partly through the influence of Lord Cobham, to whom it was inscribed,
and the praise of Fielding and Chatham, it became very popular. In 1739,
he produced a poem entitled 'London; or, The Progress of Commerce,' and a
spirited ballad entitled 'Admiral Hosier's Ghost,' which we have given,
both designed to rouse the national spirit against the Spaniards.
Glover was a merchant, and very highly esteemed among his commercial
brethren, although at one time unfortunate in business. When forced by
his failure to seek retirement, he produced a tragedy on the subject of
Boadicea, which ran the usual nine nights, although it has long since
ceased to be acted or read. In his later years his affairs improved; he
returned again to public life, was elected to Parliament, and approved
himself a painstaking and popular M.P. In 1770, he enlarged his
'Leonidas' from nine books to twelve, and afterwards wrote a sequel to
it, entitled 'The Athenais.' Glover spent his closing years in opulent
retirement, enjoying the intimacy and respect of the most eminent men of
the day, and died in 1785.
'Leonidas' may be called the epic of the eighteenth century, and betrays
the artificial genius of its age. The poet rises to his flight like a
heavy heron--not a hawk or eagle. Passages in it are good, but the effect
of the whole is dulness. It reminds you of Cowper's 'Homer,' in which all
is accurate, but all is cold, and where even the sound of battle lulls
to slumber--or of Edwin Atherstone's 'Fall of Nineveh,' where you are
fatigued with uniform pomp, and the story struggles and staggers under a
load of words. Thomson exclaimed when he heard of the work of Glover, 'He
write an epic, who never saw a mountain!' And there was justice in the
remark. The success of 'Leonidas' was probably one cause of the swarm of
epics which appeared in the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of
the nineteenth century.--Cottle himself being, according to De Quincey,
'the author of four epic poems, _and_ a new kind of blacking.' Their day
seems now for ever at an end.