Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/200

 180 "Lansdowne" and was designed as a satire on that peer, was wholly by Townshend and the piece was then more "terse and classical," more in fact what it was intended to be, a parody of one of Virgil's eclogues. But Richard Tickell, now hand in hand with the leading wits among the Whigs, took the poem up and expanded it into the form in which it appeared. It contains some good lines. Jekyll himself was credited with possessing a "book of sarcasms ready made" and a collection of "stale seventies and pilfer'd spleen." Speaking of the Temple, it is recorded that "the well-known fountain babbles day by day." Was ever, I may ask, any other fountain in the world, so plain and unpretentious as this, honoured by such an army of pilgrims? Yet the inhospitable benchers — inhospitable in this respect only — have not even given their visitors a seat on which to rest. The history of this fountain has never been fully told. It was set up in 1680—81 in the treasurership of William Whitelocke (calendar of Middle temple records, ed. C. H. Hopwood, 1903, p. 179) and cost with pavement and rails around it over £750. It was probably one of the improvements resulting from the great fire in the Temple, which broke out on Sunday night 26 Jany. 1678—9. It is mentioned by George Farquhar in his "Love and a bottle" 1698 (Act IV., Scene II.), by Charles Lamb in his essay on "the old benchers of the Inner Temple" — he "made it to rise and fall how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, his contemporaries" — and forms the subject of a poem by L. E. L. But its fame has been spread far and wide through its introduction by Dickens into the novel of "Martin Chuzzlewit."

Beau Brummell was a bit of an author himself, but he displayed more energy in collecting the poetical effusions of others. All the fashionables of that day professed a love of literature and dabbled in poetry, chiefly satirical,