Page:Poetical Works of John Oldham.djvu/17

Rh. No definite scheme of life appears to have been marked out for him; and to a mind impatient of idleness and dependence, the short time he remained in Gloucestershire, especially if his sketch of an 'ugly old priest' may be accepted as a sample of the people by whom he was surrounded, must have been intolerably irksome. In the following year, the small-pox, so frequently the subject of poetical lamentations, carried off his close companion, Mr. Richard Morwent, and Oldham expressed his grief at the loss of his friend in a Pindaric Ode, which displays much tenderness of feeling and variety of illustration. This is the only poem he is known to have written during that interval; but it is not unlikely that he found ample employment in planning some of the longer poems he afterwards produced. To this period may, probably, be assigned the germs of the Satires against the Jesuits. Living in a society of nonconformists, he was at least in a position to hear religious and sectarian topics discussed with zeal and bitterness, and may have been, to some extent, led to the consideration of the subject by surrounding influences. But the intercourse with these people was, in other respects, dreary and uncongenial, and he was glad to make his escape from them when a prospect of settling in the neighbourhood of London was offered to him, although connected with a drudgery he disliked. The situation, that of