Churchill, CHARLES, satirist, was born in Westminster in 1731. After leaving Westminster School, where he was contemporary with Colman, Robert Lloyd, Cowper, and Warren Hastings, he did not enter Oxford or Cambridge, being apparently disqualified by an imprudent Fleet marriage at seventeen. In 1756 he was ordained priest, 'through need, not choice,' and at his father's death in 1758 he was appointed to the curacy and lectureship of St John's, Westminster, the poor emoluments of which office he strove to eke out with teaching. But he was hopelessly improvident and already dissipated; accordingly, after a bankruptcy of but five shillings in the pound—and that paid only by the aid of Robert Lloyd's father—a formal separation from his wife, and a course of unclerical indecorum and dissipation that called forth the remonstrances of his dean and the protests of his parishioners, he slipped his neck from the orders which he wore so awkwardly, and cast himself entirely upon the town (January 1763). His Rosciad, published in 1761, had already made him famous and a terror to all the actors of the time. The poem was modelled on Dryden, and had real talent and vigour, as well as scurrilous and insparing personality to commend it. Later in the same year, in The Apology, he made a savage onslaught on his critics, and particularly Smollett. Night (1762), a long poetical epistle addressed to Lloyd, and suggested by Day, Armstrong's somewhat unwelcome poetical epistle to 'gay Wilkes,' contained some nervous lines, but was on the whole a poor production marred by an impudent bravado of honesty, as if it were some justification of misconduct to make a candid avowal of it. The Ghost (1762) is an incoherent and tiresome poem of over four thousand lines in octosyllabic metre, only remembered now for the attempt to satirise Dr Johnson as 'Don Pomposo' on occasion of the Cock Lane ghost-story, and the much more warrantable ridicule cast upon Whitehead the laureate. Churchill next helped Wilkes in the North Briton, and heaped timeous ridicule upon the Scotch in The Prophecy of Famine (1763), an admirable satire, bright with wit sharpened into stinging verse—undoubtedly his best work. 'It is indeed falsely applied to Scotland, but on that account may be allowed a greater share of invention,' says Boswell, with characteristically wrong-foot-foremost but whimsically ingenious reasoning. Later in the same year appeared Churchill's Epistle to Hogarth, for which the great caricaturist paid the poet by gibbeting him to all future time as a bear in torn clerical bands and ruffles, with a pot of porter, and a clnb inscribed 'Lies and North Britons.' Other works of Churchill's were The Duellist, an onslaught on Wilkes' assailants in the House of Lords; The Author, which pleased the critics and even Horace Walpole; The Conference, interesting especially for one redeeming feature—a singularly touching and true confession of remorse for the seduction (but not desertion) of a Westminster tradesman's daughter; Gotham, a long and ambitious exposition of his political ideas; The Candidate, a splendid attack on Sandwich; The Farewell, The Times, and Independence, the last containing an interestingly unflattering portrait of the poet by his own pen, in which he laughs at his burly frame and rolling gait—'much like a porpoise just before a storm.' Meantime the satirist had prospered and gained enough not only to pay off all his old debts, but to help others, for no man was ever more faithful and unreserved in love towards his friends than this sinning and repenting prodigal. In the October of 1764 he crossed to Boulogne to see Wilkes, was seized suddenly with a fever, and died on 4th November. Just before the end he sat up in bed to bequeath annuities of £60 to his wife and £50 to his mistress, for which, however, there proved to be no funds. His body was buried at Dover, and on a slab above his grave was inscribed with less than dubious truth the line from his poem The Candidate: 'Life to the last enjoyed, here Churchill lies.' Fifty-four years later Byron, leaving England for the last time, stood beside his tomb, his mind filled with reflections on 'the Glory and the Nothing of a Name,' which he shaped into a poem scarce worthy of its theme.
Churchill left two unfinished satires—The Journey, broken off at a line of sadly ominous significance: 'I on my journey all alone proceed;' and the severe and masterly Dedication to the arrogant Warburton. His satires are for the most part long since forgotten. Though neither 'a blockhead' according to Johnson, nor 'the great Churchill' as described by Cowper with all an old schoolfellow's extravagance of admiration, he was yet a satirist of high capacity, with a happy knack of turning strong and honest thought into nervous and memorable verse. At the same time he lacked the chief essentials of true satire, a real insight into the heart of man and that rarest power of happy exaggeration, of preserving likeness in unlikeness and verisimilitude in distortion. A fatal volubility in rhyming, a kind of boisterous but unequal energy, and an instinctive hatred of wrong, manly and honest, although often scarce to be distinguished from the mere reflex reaction of natural spleen and obstinacy, combined to make him the hero of the hour and its ephemeral interests, but was not equipment enough for a Dryden, a Juvenal, or even a Butler. See Forster's Historical and Biographical Essays (vol. ii. 1858), and Southey's Life of Cowper.