DISCOVERY 



241 



in, and the month is marked by a series of harvest- 

 home celebrations. September is unimportant from 

 a reUgious point of view, but October concludes the 

 agricultural process of the year with the ceremonial 

 tasting of the new wine and the strange fertility- 

 sacrifice of the October horse. The summer campaign- 

 ing season, too, had now come to an end, and a purifica- 

 tion of arms took place complementary to that of 

 the beginning of the military year in March. November 

 was a month of hard work, of ploughing and sowing, 

 and with little leisure for religious festivals. December 

 and January, however, brought the winter holidays 

 of the farmer in the respite from toil before the labours 

 of the spring sovnng commenced. In December took 

 place the Saturnalia, the forerunner of our Christmas 

 celebrations, when friends exchanged presents and 

 master and man joined in a common merry-making. 

 The earlier half of January was marked by rustic 

 festivals in the country, and in the city's calendar 

 by the feast-day of a goddess of birth. February, as 

 we have seen, was mainly given over to expiatory 

 ritual and the worship of the dead.^ 



An Eighteenth-Century 

 Character 



By Rowlands Coldicott, M.G., B.Litt. 



The works of Dr. John Wolcot, once better known as 

 " Peter Pindar," are almost forgotten, and the life of 

 the man who wrote them is known only to a very fews 

 But anyone who wishes to wander among the by-way 

 of late eighteenth-century literature will find in the 

 study of impudent Peter an excellent point of departure. 

 Before he has gone far — such is the extraordinary 

 endurance of the past — the present will begin to seem 

 brittle and unreal, and actuality, leav-ing our much- 

 trumpeted heroes of to-day, will set marching again 

 those more solid people who fiddled and talked and 

 rode and played in the days of George the Third, when 

 modern life in England first began. 



Our inquiry may well start with the publication of 

 his first quarto pamphlet in verse. Examine it as it 



' A short but very good account of the calendar and of the 

 development of Roman religion will be found in Mr. Bailey's 

 recent edition of the Third Book of the Fasti of Ovid. A longer 

 account is given in The Roman Festivals of the Period of 

 the Republic, by the late W. Warde Fowler, the wisest and 

 greatest Roman scholar of our time. His knowledge, which 

 was wide and accurate, was informed by a rare insight and a 

 real humanism. We shall not look upon his like again. 



The three best books in English upon early Roman religion 

 are Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman 

 People (Macmillan) ; Bailey, The Religion of Ancient Rome 

 (Constable) ; and Carter, The Religion of Numa (Macmillan). 



reappears on the next page, for it is something of a 

 curiosity. So far as I know, no copy except mine exists, 

 though perhaps someone will now jump up and refute 

 me. The original issue of these verses " printed for 

 the author " must have been very small. The 

 label that bears the Latin quotation has been pasted 

 over what was apparently in the first instance a mis- 

 print. Wolcot was a scholar, and could not tolerate 

 mistakes. " It's poetry that soothes both gods above 

 and spirits below," quotes Wolcot, and he proceeds to 

 give men of the world between, not poetry, but comic 

 verse. As an isolated phenomenon " The Epistle to 

 the Reviewers " would not be remarkable, though it 

 is the first set of verses that Wolcot wrote in what 

 afterwards became his characteristic style ; but as a 

 solitary singing shell preluding a long bombardment it 

 is of importance in the history of comic verse. In the 

 third stanza Wolcot promises the pubhc a succession 

 of " Sonnets, Odes, and Legendary Tales " in terms that 

 imply that his pockets were already full of them. 

 Strangely enough, nothing happened for about four 

 years, when a pamphlet appeared in London entitled 

 " Lyric Odes to the Royal Academicians for 

 MDCCLXXXII by Peter Pindar Esq", A Distant 

 Relation of the Poet of Thebes, and Laureate to the 

 Academy." From that year till 1812, when a collected 

 edition of his works was published in five volumes — 

 all in verse and mostly comic — Pindar's " distant 

 relation " never ceased publishing, and even then 

 outgrew his own collected edition and went on and on, 

 till finally at his death, in 1818. he left a chestful of 

 unpublished manuscripts, many of which are scattered 

 about the world in private collections, and have 

 wandered even to New Zealand. 



There must have been something remarkable about 

 a man who could make the public listen for so long. 

 Though he enjoyed writing, he published in order to 

 make money and have a good time. He was no 

 hypocrite, and made no bones about it : 



" Ladies, I keep a rhyme-shop ; mine's a trade ; 

 I sell to old and young, to man and maid : 

 All customers must be obliged ; and no man 

 Wishes more universally to please. 

 I'd really crawl upon my hands and knees 

 T'oblige ; particularly, lovely Woman." 



Towards the end of his life he said to his friend Taylor : 

 " I was poor, and hunted in vain for Fortune in Europe, 

 Africa, and the West Indies, but at last found her in a 

 shop in Paternoster Row, laughing over my works and 

 adv-ising the booksellers to buy the copyright." 



Wolcot made it pretty clear, too, in " The Epistle to 

 the Reviewers," that he was out after commercial 

 success. And yet, knowing the man, it is perfectly 

 certain to me that what he loved far more was the free 

 exercise of his undoubted powers in the presence of as 



