PETER PINDAR
The Atlas.][April 5, 1829.
This celebrated wit and character lived to a great age, and retained his spirit and faculties to the last. In person he did not at all answer to Mr. Cobbett’s description of authors, as a lean, starveling, puny race—‘men made after supper of a cheese-paring’—he was large, robust, portly, and florid; or in Chaucer’s phrase,
‘A manly man to ben an abbot able.’
‘A manly man to ben an abbot able.’
‘A manly man to ben an abbot able.’
‘A manly man to ben an abbot able.’
In his latter years he was blind, and had his head close shaved; and as he sat bare-headed, presented the appearance of a fine old monk—a Luther or aFriar John, with the gravity of the one and the wit and fiery turbulence of the other. Peter had something clerical in his aspect: he looked like a venerable father of poetry, or an unworthy son of the church, equally fitted to indict a homily and preach a crusade, or to point an epigram, and was evidently one of those children of Momus in whom the good things of the body had laid the foundation of and given birth to the good things of the mind. He was one of the few authors who did not disappoint the expectations raised of them on a nearer acquaintance; and the reason probably was what has been above hinted at, namely, that he did not take to this calling from nervous despondency and constitutional poverty ofspirit, but from the fulness and exuberance of his intellectual resources and animal spirits. Our satirist was not a mere wit, but a man of strong sense and observation, critical, argumentative, a good declaimer, and with a number of acquirements of various kinds. His poetry, instead of having absorbed all the little wit he had (which is so often the case), was but ‘the sweepings of his mind.’ He said just as good things every hour in the day. He was the life and soul of the company where he was—told a story admirably, gave his opinion freely, spoke equally well, and with thorough knowledge of poetry, painting, or music, could ‘haloo an anthem’ with stentorian lungs in imitation of the whole chorus of children at St. Paul’s, or bring the black population of the West Indies before you like a swarm of flies in a sugar-basin, by his manner of describing their antics and odd noises. Dr. Wolcot’s conversation was rich and powerful (not to say overpowering)—there was an extreme unction about it, but a certain tincture of grossness. His criticism was his best. We remember in particular his making an excellent analysis of Dryden’sAlexander’s Feastin a controversy on its merits with Mr. Curran; and as a specimen of hisparallelismsbetween the sister-arts, he used to say of Viotti (the celebrated violin-player), that ‘he was the Michael Angelo of the fiddle.’ He had a heresy in painting, which was, that Claude Lorraine was inferior to Wilson; but the orthodox believers were obliged to be silent before him. A short time before his death he had a private lodging at Somers’ Town, where he received a few friends. He sat and talked familiarly and cheerfully, asking you whether you thought his head would not make a fine bust? He had a decanter of rum placed on the table before him, from which he poured out a glass-full as he wanted it and drank it pure, taking no other beverage, but not exceeding in this. His infirmities had made no alteration in his conversation, except perhaps a little more timidity and hesitation; for blindness is thelamenessof the mind. He could not see the effect of what he said lighting up the countenances of others; and in this case, the tongue may run on the faster, but hardly so well. After coffee, which he accompanied with the due quantity ofmerum sal, he would ask to be led down into a little parlour below, which was hung round with some early efforts of his own in landscape-painting, and with some of Wilson’s unfinished sketches. Though he could see them no longer, otherwise than in his mind’s eye, he was evidently pleased to be in the room with them, as they brought back former associations. Youth and age seem glad to meet as it were on the last hill-top of life, to shake hands once more and part for ever! He spoke slightingly of his own performances (though they were by no means contemptible), but launched out with greatfervour in praise of his favourite Wilson, and in disparagement of Claude, enlarging on the fine broad manner and bold effects of the one, and on the finical littleness of the other, and ‘making the worse appear the better reason.’ It was here we last parted with this fine old man, and it is with mixed pleasure and regret we turn to the subject. Peter Pindar, besides his vein of comic humour, excelled when he chose in the serious and pathetic; and his ‘Lines to a Fly drowned in Treacle,’ and ‘To an Expiring Taper,’ are among his best pieces.