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Anyhow, it is a sorry story, and a blot on the scutcheon of the poet, who, good-hearted as he usually was, was cursed by the gift, refined to a rare degree, of alienating his friends, more often than not for some fancied slight. Addison he lampooned, and from Dennis and Philips he parted company. "Leave him as soon as you can," Addison had warned Lady Mary.
To be thus abused, and reviled, and scouted, for merely desiring to be allowed to live in peace, and to have nothing to do with a squabble in which I did not feel in any way interested. But this was not all. I was lampooned, caricatured, and paragraphed in the newspapers, in a thousand different ways.
By the rabble they were hooted and pelted. Clowns in the circus made them the subjects of their jokes. Newspaper scribblers lampooned and libelled them. Politicians denounced them. By the Church they were regarded as very black sheep, and sometimes excluded from the fold.
He had lampooned them in verses, he had beaten and cheated them; and yet now, when he was in so close a pinch, he thought there was at least one who might perhaps relent. It was a chance. It was worth trying at least, and he would go and see. On the way, two little accidents happened to him which coloured his musings in a very different manner.
Also he lampooned them under the style of Avidieu and Avidieu's wife, who "Sell their presented partridges or fruits, And humbly live on rabbits and on roots; One half-pint bottle serves them both to dine, And is at once their vinegar and wine. Lady Mary took her place, as of right, as a leader of society, and for a while plunged into the gaieties of the town.
But the most amusing personages were the buffoons: they mimicked and joked, and lampooned and lied, as if by inspiration. As the bottle circulated, and talk grew louder, the lampooning and the lying were not, however, confined to the buffoons. On the contrary, the best born and best bred people seemed to excel the most in those polite arts.
But from Homer onward, instances can be cited, his own Margites, for example, and other similar compositions. The appropriate metre was also here introduced; hence the measure is still called the iambic or lampooning measure, being that in which people lampooned one another. Thus the older poets were distinguished as writers of heroic or of lampooning verse.
He must go through all the miseries of a canvass, must shake hands with crowds of freeholders or freemen, must ask after their wives and children, must hire conveyances for outvoters, must open alehouses, must provide mountains of beef, must set rivers of ale running, and might perhaps, after all the drudgery and all the expense, after being lampooned, hustled, pelted, find himself at the bottom of the poll, see his antagonists chaired, and sink half ruined into obscurity.
Grave doctors had anathematized him; ribald poets had lampooned him; princes and ministers had laid snares for his life; he had been long a wanderer and an exile, in constant peril of being kidnapped, struck in the boots, hanged and quartered. Yet none of these things had ever seemed to move him. His selfconceit had been proof against ridicule, and his dauntless temper against danger.
In Ravenna the papal envoy was lampooned and laughed at. Then in the end of 596 the exarch Romanus died. By 598 an armistice had been officially concluded between the imperialists and the Lombards, and at length in 599, after some foolish delays in which it would appear that the pope was not without blame, a peace was concluded.
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