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Updated: May 24, 2025
When we add to these invectives, damnations of friends as well as foes, of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, philosophers, popes, pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, fools and wise, capable and incapable, men, women, and children, it is really no better than a kind of diabolical sublimation of Lord Thurlow's anathemas in the Rolliad, which begins with "Damnation seize ye all;"
This very remarkable body of satirical verse, which extends from the Rolliad and the early satires of Peter Pindar at the extreme beginning of our present time to the Pursuits of Literature and the Anti-Jacobin towards its close, was partly literary and partly political, diverging indeed into other subjects, but keeping chiefly to these two and intermixing them rather inextricably.
Free-thinking is for one's self, surely not for society. Perhaps Richard Fitzpatrick is meant, who later on joined in writing The Rolliad, and who was the cousin and 'sworn brother' of Charles Fox. Walpole describes him as 'an agreeable young man of parts, and mentions his 'genteel irony and badinage. Journal of the Reign of George III, i. 167 and ii. 560.
It is possible that in the interval between the conception and the execution the boy happened to light upon a copy of the Rolliad. If such was the case, he already had too fine a sense of humour to have persevered in his original plan after reading that masterpiece of drollery.
At no time was this truth ever more strikingly exemplified than at present, when a separation seems to have taken place between satire and wit, which leaves the former like the toad, without the "jewel in its head;" and when the hands, into which the weapon of personality has chiefly fallen, have brought upon it a stain and disrepute, that will long keep such writers as those of the Rolliad and Antijacobin from touching it again.
The Pursuits of Literature, though mainly devoted to the subject of its title, is also to a great extent political; the Rolliad and the Probationary Odes, intensely political, were also to no small extent literary.
He was rather a strong partisan, and, having a brilliant vein of poetical satire, he wrote in 1813 The Twopenny Post Bag the best satiric verse of the poetical kind since the Anti-Jacobin, and the best on the Whig side since the Rolliad.
Pitt, and embarrassed naturally by the recollection of what he had been guilty of towards his host in The Rolliad, some of his brother-wits, to amuse themselves at his expense, endeavored to lead the conversation to the subject of this work, by asking him various questions, as to its authors, &c., which Mr. Pitt overhearing, from the upper end of the table, leaned kindly towards Ellis and said,
The author of the Rolliad describes his power as 'Even by the elements confessed, Of mines and boroughs Lonsdale stands possessed; And one sad servitude alike denotes The slave that labours and the slave that votes. It was on this political boroughmonger and jobber that Boswell was now pinning his faith.
They have poured forth a torrent of odes, epigrams, and part of an imaginary epic poem, called the "Rolliad," with a commentary and notes, that is as good as the "Dispensary" and "Dunciad," with more ease. These poems are all anti-ministerial, and the authors very young men, and little known or heard of before.
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