Buried in the vestry vault of the churchyard of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, London, so near that their coffins actually touch, are the mortal remains of two remarkable Englishmen.

The one is a Worcestershire worthy, Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, a caricaturist in verse of the times in which he lived. His chief character, giving name to the book by which he is best known, was suggested by Sir Samuel Luke, his puritan patron, whilst the book itself, commenced in 1663 and modelled after the Don Quixote of Cervantes, is in its faithful exposure of cant and hypocrisy scarcely inferior to its spirited Spanish prototype.

The other distinguished person who found a resting-place so near him, also a satirist and an accomplished genius with many and varied gifts, was Dr. John Wolcot, a Devonian, born at Kingsbridge, or, more accurately, Dodbrooke, who is better known as Peter Pindar, whose lively writings were most popular in the time of the later Georges, and who then enjoyed a large measure of favour with society, whose questionable manners he so fearlessly portrayed, and for a while at least with the Court, every one of whom in turn, from the King and Prince Regent down to the royal kitchen maids and cooks, he mercilessly, cleverly, and continuously lampooned.

It is with this latter curious and cosmopolitan poet and satirist that we have to do. We shall be obliged to tread carefully as we follow the track of his life and his literature, for at the very outset we must remember that the times in which he lived were coarse and in many ways objectionable, and that he was, if not a product, at least a reflection of them.

We may wonder why he took upon himself the name of Pindar with the added apostolic difference—Peter. Was it done playfully or satirically, as was usual with him? Perhaps it was a joke at the expense of his neighbours, whose talk was so seldom on literature and art, but so often on oves et boves. Turning to the Biographia Classica, which he very possibly used, we read:—“Pindar, the first of the lyric poets born in Bœotia.... He quitted his native country, which was proverbial for the stupidity of its inhabitants, and went to Athens, where the greatest honours were bestowed upon him.... Such was the respect paid to his memory that when the Lacedemonians took Thebes, they spared his house, as also did Alexander the Great.” To this historical fact Wolcot frequently alluded, as, for instance, in the clever poem entitled—

His allusions to Pindar the Greater make one fear that he has paid an ill compliment to his old friends, and that in his choice of a nom de plume he has allowed, as in many other instances, his merciless satire to overcome his evenness of judgment. Like his namesake, he turned from the country to find his laurels in the town, and there the parallel ends. It is not true that the people of South Devon, who singularly combine agricultural skill with good seamanship, so that they handle equally well the plough and the oar, are open to any implication of special dulness.

There is little in common between the two Pindars, the ancient and the modern. Peter displayed great skill of a kind in his versification, but no one can say it was to any extent truly lyrical. We cannot imagine the people singing his productions. They were popular, readable, pungent, savoury (too much so by a long way), but certainly not lyrical, for he had not the singer’s heart or the singer’s sweetness. Beyond the attraction of “apt alliteration’s artful aid,” we can see no great reason why he should have gone so far as Thebes in 540 B.C. to appropriate the name of that ancient singer of triumphal hymns for classic warriors.

There is a pretty story of the older Pindar that a swarm of bees lighted on his cradle in his infancy and left honey on his lips; but we fear in the case of our hero they were wasps that came, and that they left some of the caustic venom of their stings.

The odes of Pindar the Great have survived and are to be admired “for sublimity of sentiment, grandeur of expression, energy and magnificence of style, boldness of metaphors, harmony of numbers, and elegance of diction.” According to Horace he was inimitable, and all succeeding writers have agreed in extolling his genius.

Peter Pindar also called his favourite productions odes. We have them before us in bulky quartos as originally published, and in numerous volumes of pocket size as collected in 1816 by Walker. They were written in Cornwall, Devon, the West Indies, Bath and London, and covered a very wide range of subjects. He approached the realm of poetry as George Morland did that of pictorial art, refusing no subject on account of its coarseness, and yet with his fidelity of treatment in describing both rustic and town life, has often shown a fine appreciation of truth and of the beautiful.

Like George Morland he was spoiled by moral laxity, and like him always gives us a sad impression of what he might have been and might have done, if his clever genius had been kept within bounds by moral restraint. But, alas! even as an old man, he retained a taste for the follies which corrupted his youth, and continued to reflect too faithfully the spirit of those immoral days when the scandalous manners of the court were injurious alike to the Church and the State. It would have been better for him to have taken the advice he gives in one of his odes:—

The name of the classic Pindar has been associated with other writers than Dr. Wolcot, who probably have better claims to use it than ever he had.

Thomas Gray (1716–1771), whose monument in Westminster Abbey bears these lines:

Jean Dorot (1507–1588) and Pouce Denis Debrun (1729–1807), have each worn the title of French Pindar, whilst Gabriello Cluobrera (1552–1637) was the acknowledged Italian Pindar. Peter’s work has been translated into most of the continental tongues, and has been appreciated in Germany especially but not in France, his Francophobia being all too evident in many allusions to the French people. His poetry is too full of the localisms of his native county to be fully appreciated by any but Devonians, and too full of personal and political references and allusions to persons about the court and in the London society of that day to appeal successfully to readers of the present generation.

Our Dr. John Wolcot was the fourth child of Dr. Alexander Wolcot, himself a surgeon’s son residing at Kingsbridge, on the bank of the estuary at the foot of the town. The grounds of the family dwelling extended from the old Dartmouth Road at the back down to the water’s edge, and the house, though much altered, still retains its name of Pindar Lodge. His baptismal register, preserved at the Church of St. Thomas à Becket, Dodbrooke, is dated May 9th, 1738. Of his mother we have not been able to gather much information beyond her name—Mary Ryder—and that she belonged to a local family. The Ryders are still numerously represented in the townships both of Kingsbridge and Dodbrooke.

The Grammar School of Kingsbridge, erected at the cost of the old 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:—

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:—

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:—

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—

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

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:—

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:—

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:—

He quotes these stanzas as characteristic alike of the humour and the dialect. Introducing the Royal entry:—

The King was not entertained at the Palace, but was sent to the Dean. Peter says:—

Peter affected to have heard the King’s remarks about the cathedral:—

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:—

The King is befogged by the 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:—

A writer in the Encyclopædia Britannica gives this most accurate appreciation:—

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:—

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.

Commencing his London residence in 1781, soon after the publication of his first book of lyric odes, he lived in many different houses, in Southampton Row (1793); Tavistock Row (1794); Chapel Street, Portland Place (1800); 8, Delany Place, Camden Town (1802); 94, Tottenham Court Road (1807); and Latham Place, Somer’s Town, where he died on the 14th January, 1819.

Of his personal appearance much has been said. He has been described as “a thick, squat man with a large, dark and flat face and no speculation in his eye.” There are many portraits of him published, most of them by his protégé, Opie, the “Cornish boy,” as he calls him, whom he both educated and boomed in the press, a genius of undoubted merit as a painter. Unless these pictures outrageously flatter him, his must have been a fine physiognomy. We have seen eight or nine portraits, taken at different periods of his life, and in all he appears like a well-bred and handsome man of the style and period of George the Fourth. There is a miniature of him, however, in the National Portrait Gallery, which is said with candour to express many of the disagreeable features of his character. Our own portrait appended to this sketch is from a painting by Opie, engraved by C. H. Hodges, and reproduced in photography by Bailey, of Kingsbridge. One of his most faithful portraits is a miniature by Lethbridge, a Kingsbridge artist of some fame, who was born at Goveton, a little hamlet not far from the town.

Probably the last public compliment ever received by Peter Pindar was the dedication by his scholarly neighbour to him of the well-known History of Kingsbridge, published in 1819 (the year of Pindar’s death) by A. Hawkins, Esq., F.H.S. With the terms of that dedication we might fitly close our notice:—