Samuel Croxall
Encyclopedia
Samuel Croxall was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables
.
. He was educated at Eton
and at St John's College, Cambridge
, where he took his B.A. in 1711 and entered holy orders
. Soon after graduating he began to emerge as a political pamphleteer
, taking the Whig side on the question of the Hanoverian succession. In 1713 he published An original original canto of Spencer: design'd as part of his Faerie Queene, but never printed, followed next year by Another original canto of Spencer. Croxall's satirical target was the Tory
politician of the day, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the choice of poetical model was also politically motivated. In 1706 the Whig turncoat Matthew Prior
had used the Spenserian stanza
in An Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen on the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession
; at the time of Croxall's poems, Prior was negotiating an unpopular peace on behalf of Harley and so the style he had adopted was being turned against him. This was further underlined by Croxall's next political poem, An ode humbly inscrib’d to the king, occasion’d by His Majesty’s most auspicious succession and arrival, once more using the Spenserian stanza and published in 1715.
As a reward for his loyal services at a time of disputed succession, Croxall was made chaplain in ordinary to King George I
for the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court. Later that year he preached before the king at St Paul's Cathedral
on Incendiaries no Christians (on the text of John 13.35) and came into collision with the new Prime Minister, Robert Walpole
. Gossip had it that Walpole had stood in the way to some ecclesiastical dignity which Croxall wished to obtain and found himself the object of veiled references to corrupt and wicked ministers of state in the sermon. Since Walpole was a vengeful man, 'it was expected that the doctor for the offence he had given would have been removed from his chaplainship, but the court overruled it, as he had always manifested himself to be a zealous friend to the Hanoverian succession'. Croxall continued his compliment to the king in his poem "A Vision", which places the new monarch within the context of the succession of kings and queens of England, presided over by the poets Geoffrey Chaucer
and Edmund Spenser
.
In 1717 Croxall married Philippa Proger, who had inherited her father's lands in Breconshire, including the family home of Gwern Vale; later he was to take up residence there from time to time. During his continued stay in London he moved in the circle of the Kit-Cat Club
, a grouping of Whig politicians and writers. One of their joint literary projects was the translation of the 15 books of Ovid
's Metamorphoses under the editorship of Samuel Garth
. Among the other contributors were John Dryden
, Joseph Addison
, Arthur Mainwaring, John Rowe
, John Gay
and Laurence Eusden
. Croxall's contribution was to translate the sixth book, three stories of the eighth book, one story of the tenth (the fable of Cyparissus), seven of the eleventh, and one of the thirteenth (the funeral of Memnon). As a translator of Ovid, he was still being talked of a century later in Leigh Hunt
's reminiscences of Lord Byron. There he remarks of the arbitrary nature of the poet's tastes that 'It would have been impossible to persuade him that Sandys’s Ovid was better than Addison’s and Croxall’s'.
During the following years Croxall was engaged in several literary ventures on his own account. In 1720 he edited A Select Collection of Novels written by the most celebrated authors in several languages. In its four volumes were eighteen complete or extracted works by such authors as Madame de la Fayette, Miguel de Cervantes
, Nicolas Machiavelli, the Abbé de St. Réal, and Paul Scarron
. So successful was this that he extended it to six volumes containing nine new works in 1722. Further editions under different titles followed into which some English works were also introduced. But Croxall was to achieve even greater success with his other work of 1722, The Fables of Aesop and Others, which were told in an easy colloquial style and followed by 'instructive applications'. Aimed at children, each fable was accompanied by illustrations which were soon to find their way onto household crockery and tiles. Several more editions were published in his lifetime and the book was continuously in print until well into the second half of the 19th century.
of Hereford Cathedral
and the following year he became a Doctor of Divinity
. In 1732 he was made archdeacon
of Shropshire
and in 1738 chancellor
of Hereford. By this time Samuel's brother Rodney had followed him into the ministry and was living in Hereford. Samuel scandalised the citizens by demolishing an ancient chapel and using the stone to build Rodney a house.
His later publications were mainly religious. These include six of his sermons which comprise, as well as "Incendiaries no Christians": one preached in Lambeth Chapel at the consecration of the bishops of Hereford and of St. David's (1723); one preached before the Honourable House of Commons
at St. Margaret's, Westminster
on the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I
(1729); and one on "The antiquity, dignity and advantages of music", delivered in the cathedral church of Hereford on the occasion of the Three Choirs Festival
in 1741. He also wrote the voluminous Scripture Politics: Being a View of the Original Constitution, and Subsequent Revolutions, in the Government Religious and Civil, of that people out of whom the SAVIOUR of the WORLD was to arise, published in 1735 with 'the design to make the Bible more easily understood'. At the end of his life he brought out a final poem, "The Royal Manual" (1750), a moral prayer and meditation containing 22 sections of 16 lines each.
Croxall's anti-Catholic stance was part of the libertarian programme adopted by the Whig supporters of a Protestant succession
and is manifested in a variety of ways. Unsurprisingly it is to be found in his political poetry, most notably in the portrait of the proud, triple-crowned Romania, the companion of the tyranising Sir Burbon in stanzas 38-9 of the first Spenserian canto, and in the stanza devoted to the Roman Inquisition (12) in the second. Another unfavourable allusion to Catholic practice occurs in the second of his extracts from Ovid's Fasti where, following a reference to the naked priests of Faunus, Croxall departs from the original to observe that in place of outward observation of the naked truth, 'modern Rome, to scour us all from sin,/ Appoints a prying Priest to peep within'.
A more surprising context for the party line is in the preface to The Fables of Aesop. Here Croxall attacks the principles of interpretation of his immediate predecessor as fabulist, Sir Roger L'Estrange
, as ‘coined and suited to promote the growth, and serve the ends, of Popery and arbitrary power....In every political touch he shows himself to be the tool and hireling of the Popish faction'. L'Estrange's versions are as lively and colloquial as Croxall's while his commentaries are shorter and , if anything, less political. In fact, the rival author's real crime was to be a supporter of the Stuart
regime, for which at one time he acted as press censor.
were included in what was the nearest thing to a Collected Poems that Croxall ever published, the later editions of The Fair Circassian, which contained a miscellany of other pieces. The reason why such learned fare appeared in the context of what are otherwise love poems is that both extracts deal with scenes of attempted rape described with bawdy relish:
The voyeuristic character of this extract reappears elsewhere in the collection, especially in the account of a naked girl taking a midnight dip, "Florinda seen while she was bathing". Add to these the suggestive ambiguity of the metaphors in his love poems to Sylvia and it is not difficult to understand why the poems were so often reissued or the controversy stirred up by the title poem that they accompany.
The Fair Circassian: a dramatic performance was first published in 1720. An adaptation of the biblical Song of Solomon, it consists of eight short sections written in couplets in which King Solomon and an imaginary slave-girl called Saphira engage in amorous dialogue. Embarrassed by the existence of such sensuous writing in their holy book, it was declared clerical opinion that this inspired scripture was emblematic of relations between the Messiah and the Church. Many in the clergy therefore did not take kindly to having it treated as a love poem and accused the author of writing licentiously. James Craig, a Scottish minister from Edinburgh, denounced the work in a poem complaining of the prostitution of genius, of which he takes Croxall's poem as a particularly flagrant example:
Knowing the risks to which his whole poetic output exposed him, Croxall took pains to conceal his authorship both by using pseudonyms and providing false information about the work's origin. As well as the transparent fiction that the satires on Harley are examples of ancient poetry, their discovery and editing are ascribed to Nestor Ironside. The Fair Circassian is supposedly the work of 'A Gentleman Commoner of Oxford' who had lately died, one is led to believe in the preface, of love for one of the queen's maids of honour. Even his final poem, "The Royal Manual", of which any clergyman would not be ashamed, he endeavoured to pass off as discovered among the manuscripts of Andrew Marvell
. Such was the notoriety of his poetical output and the power of his named literary productions, however, that it was impossible to keep their origin hidden for long.
. In examining the poetry of the period for evidence of trends leading towards the Romantic movement, the scholar William Lyon Phelps
groups such authors as Croxall, Lady Winchilsea and Allan Ramsay
as 'currents flowing in a direction opposite to the general stream; individualities who were really out of sympathy with the Augustans, but who were overpowered by the prevailing fashion partly because the fashion was so strong, partly because no one of them had sufficient force publicly to throw off the shackles'. He goes on to comment of Croxall that 'he seems to have been wholly out of sympathy with the spirit of the age, even consciously and defiantly so' (p. 28).
Phelps finds evidence for this judgement in Croxall's evident fascination with the poetry of Spenser, but Croxall was only one of several following the example of Prior's 1706 "Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen". All that can be claimed for him is that his imitation is closer to the original and the ancestor of later works claiming to be new additions to the Faerie Queene. The only other poem manifesting some degree of originality is The Fair Circassian which Croxall describes in his preface as 'a kind of opera or dramatic performance'. The model he had in mind was Handel
's recently performed and very successful pastoral opera Acis and Galatea, to a text written by the poets John Gay and (possibly) Alexander Pope
. Written at a time when authors were looking round for novel applications of the outworn tradition of Classical Pastoral
writing, Croxall's amorous eclogue with its exotic Eastern setting takes the tradition forward to the vogue set by William Collins
' Oriental Eclogues (1742) and the considerable influence this had on the subject matter of the Romantic poets.
Aesop's Fables
Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today...
.
Early career
Samuel Croxall was born in Walton on Thames, where his father (also called Samuel) was vicarVicar
In the broadest sense, a vicar is a representative, deputy or substitute; anyone acting "in the person of" or agent for a superior . In this sense, the title is comparable to lieutenant...
. He was educated at Eton
Eton College
Eton College, often referred to simply as Eton, is a British independent school for boys aged 13 to 18. It was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI as "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"....
and at St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College, Cambridge
St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college's alumni include nine Nobel Prize winners, six Prime Ministers, three archbishops, at least two princes, and three Saints....
, where he took his B.A. in 1711 and entered holy orders
Holy Orders
The term Holy Orders is used by many Christian churches to refer to ordination or to those individuals ordained for a special role or ministry....
. Soon after graduating he began to emerge as a political pamphleteer
Pamphleteer
A pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets. Pamphlets were used to broadcast the writer's opinions on an issue, for example, in order to get people to vote for their favorite politician or to articulate a particular political ideology.A famous pamphleteer...
, taking the Whig side on the question of the Hanoverian succession. In 1713 he published An original original canto of Spencer: design'd as part of his Faerie Queene, but never printed, followed next year by Another original canto of Spencer. Croxall's satirical target was the Tory
Tory
Toryism is a traditionalist and conservative political philosophy which grew out of the Cavalier faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It is a prominent ideology in the politics of the United Kingdom, but also features in parts of The Commonwealth, particularly in Canada...
politician of the day, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the choice of poetical model was also politically motivated. In 1706 the Whig turncoat Matthew Prior
Matthew Prior
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat.Prior was the son of a Nonconformist joiner at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr. Busby. On his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel...
had used the Spenserian stanza
Spenserian stanza
The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is...
in An Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen on the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession
War of the Spanish Succession
The War of the Spanish Succession was fought among several European powers, including a divided Spain, over the possible unification of the Kingdoms of Spain and France under one Bourbon monarch. As France and Spain were among the most powerful states of Europe, such a unification would have...
; at the time of Croxall's poems, Prior was negotiating an unpopular peace on behalf of Harley and so the style he had adopted was being turned against him. This was further underlined by Croxall's next political poem, An ode humbly inscrib’d to the king, occasion’d by His Majesty’s most auspicious succession and arrival, once more using the Spenserian stanza and published in 1715.
As a reward for his loyal services at a time of disputed succession, Croxall was made chaplain in ordinary to King George I
George I of Great Britain
George I was King of Great Britain and Ireland from 1 August 1714 until his death, and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire from 1698....
for the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court. Later that year he preached before the king at St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral, London, is a Church of England cathedral and seat of the Bishop of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle dates back to the original church on this site, founded in AD 604. St Paul's sits at the top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in the City of London, and is the mother...
on Incendiaries no Christians (on the text of John 13.35) and came into collision with the new Prime Minister, Robert Walpole
Robert Walpole
Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, KG, KB, PC , known before 1742 as Sir Robert Walpole, was a British statesman who is generally regarded as having been the first Prime Minister of Great Britain....
. Gossip had it that Walpole had stood in the way to some ecclesiastical dignity which Croxall wished to obtain and found himself the object of veiled references to corrupt and wicked ministers of state in the sermon. Since Walpole was a vengeful man, 'it was expected that the doctor for the offence he had given would have been removed from his chaplainship, but the court overruled it, as he had always manifested himself to be a zealous friend to the Hanoverian succession'. Croxall continued his compliment to the king in his poem "A Vision", which places the new monarch within the context of the succession of kings and queens of England, presided over by the poets Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...
and Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser
Edmund Spenser was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and one of the greatest poets in the English...
.
In 1717 Croxall married Philippa Proger, who had inherited her father's lands in Breconshire, including the family home of Gwern Vale; later he was to take up residence there from time to time. During his continued stay in London he moved in the circle of the Kit-Cat Club
Kit-Cat Club
The Kit-Cat Club was an early 18th century English club in London with strong political and literary associations, committed to the furtherance of Whig objectives, meeting at the Trumpet tavern in London, and at Water Oakley in the Berkshire countryside.The first meetings were held at a tavern in...
, a grouping of Whig politicians and writers. One of their joint literary projects was the translation of the 15 books of Ovid
Ovid
Publius Ovidius Naso , known as Ovid in the English-speaking world, was a Roman poet who is best known as the author of the three major collections of erotic poetry: Heroides, Amores, and Ars Amatoria...
's Metamorphoses under the editorship of Samuel Garth
Samuel Garth
Sir Samuel Garth FRS was an English physician and poet.Garth was born in Bolam in County Durham and matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1676, graduating B.A. in 1679 and...
. Among the other contributors were John Dryden
John Dryden
John Dryden was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden.Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet...
, Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison
Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was a man of letters, eldest son of Lancelot Addison...
, Arthur Mainwaring, John Rowe
John Rowe
John Rowe may refer to:*John Rowe , English clergyman*John Rowe , British actor*John Rowe , navy officer of the U.S...
, John Gay
John Gay
John Gay was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera , set to music by Johann Christoph Pepusch...
and Laurence Eusden
Laurence Eusden
Laurence Eusden was an English poet who became Poet Laureate in 1718.- Life :Laurence Eusden was born in Spofforth in the North Riding of Yorkshire in 1688 to the Rev. Laurence Eusden, rector of Spofforth, Yorkshire. Eusden was baptized on 6 September 1688...
. Croxall's contribution was to translate the sixth book, three stories of the eighth book, one story of the tenth (the fable of Cyparissus), seven of the eleventh, and one of the thirteenth (the funeral of Memnon). As a translator of Ovid, he was still being talked of a century later in Leigh Hunt
Leigh Hunt
James Henry Leigh Hunt , best known as Leigh Hunt, was an English critic, essayist, poet and writer.-Early life:Leigh Hunt was born at Southgate, London, where his parents had settled after leaving the USA...
's reminiscences of Lord Byron. There he remarks of the arbitrary nature of the poet's tastes that 'It would have been impossible to persuade him that Sandys’s Ovid was better than Addison’s and Croxall’s'.
During the following years Croxall was engaged in several literary ventures on his own account. In 1720 he edited A Select Collection of Novels written by the most celebrated authors in several languages. In its four volumes were eighteen complete or extracted works by such authors as Madame de la Fayette, Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered the first modern novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written...
, Nicolas Machiavelli, the Abbé de St. Réal, and Paul Scarron
Paul Scarron
Paul Scarron was a French poet, dramatist, and novelist. His precise birthdate is unknown, but he was baptized on July 4, 1610...
. So successful was this that he extended it to six volumes containing nine new works in 1722. Further editions under different titles followed into which some English works were also introduced. But Croxall was to achieve even greater success with his other work of 1722, The Fables of Aesop and Others, which were told in an easy colloquial style and followed by 'instructive applications'. Aimed at children, each fable was accompanied by illustrations which were soon to find their way onto household crockery and tiles. Several more editions were published in his lifetime and the book was continuously in print until well into the second half of the 19th century.
Religious career
With royal patronage behind him, and having made judicious friendships in the Anglican hierarchy, Croxall began moving up the ecclesiastical ladder too. In 1727 he was made a prebendaryPrebendary
A prebendary is a post connected to an Anglican or Catholic cathedral or collegiate church and is a type of canon. Prebendaries have a role in the administration of the cathedral...
of Hereford Cathedral
Hereford Cathedral
The current Hereford Cathedral, located at Hereford in England, dates from 1079. Its most famous treasure is Mappa Mundi, a mediæval map of the world dating from the 13th century. The cathedral is a Grade I listed building.-Origins:...
and the following year he became a Doctor of Divinity
Doctor of Divinity
Doctor of Divinity is an advanced academic degree in divinity. Historically, it identified one who had been licensed by a university to teach Christian theology or related religious subjects....
. In 1732 he was made archdeacon
Archdeacon
An archdeacon is a senior clergy position in Anglicanism, Syrian Malabar Nasrani, Chaldean Catholic, and some other Christian denominations, above that of most clergy and below a bishop. In the High Middle Ages it was the most senior diocesan position below a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church...
of Shropshire
Shropshire
Shropshire is a county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes, the county is a NUTS 3 region and is one of four counties or unitary districts that comprise the "Shropshire and Staffordshire" NUTS 2 region. It borders Wales to the west...
and in 1738 chancellor
Chancellor
Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...
of Hereford. By this time Samuel's brother Rodney had followed him into the ministry and was living in Hereford. Samuel scandalised the citizens by demolishing an ancient chapel and using the stone to build Rodney a house.
His later publications were mainly religious. These include six of his sermons which comprise, as well as "Incendiaries no Christians": one preached in Lambeth Chapel at the consecration of the bishops of Hereford and of St. David's (1723); one preached before the Honourable House of Commons
House of Commons of Great Britain
The House of Commons of Great Britain was the lower house of the Parliament of Great Britain between 1707 and 1801. In 1707, as a result of the Acts of Union of that year, it replaced the House of Commons of England and the third estate of the Parliament of Scotland, as one of the most significant...
at St. Margaret's, Westminster
St. Margaret's, Westminster
The Anglican church of St. Margaret, Westminster Abbey is situated in the grounds of Westminster Abbey on Parliament Square, and is the parish church of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in London...
on the anniversary of the beheading of Charles I
Charles I of England
Charles I was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. Charles engaged in a struggle for power with the Parliament of England, attempting to obtain royal revenue whilst Parliament sought to curb his Royal prerogative which Charles...
(1729); and one on "The antiquity, dignity and advantages of music", delivered in the cathedral church of Hereford on the occasion of the Three Choirs Festival
Three Choirs Festival
The Three Choirs Festival is a music festival held each August alternately at the cathedrals of the Three Counties and originally featuring their three choirs, which remain central to the week-long programme...
in 1741. He also wrote the voluminous Scripture Politics: Being a View of the Original Constitution, and Subsequent Revolutions, in the Government Religious and Civil, of that people out of whom the SAVIOUR of the WORLD was to arise, published in 1735 with 'the design to make the Bible more easily understood'. At the end of his life he brought out a final poem, "The Royal Manual" (1750), a moral prayer and meditation containing 22 sections of 16 lines each.
Croxall's anti-Catholic stance was part of the libertarian programme adopted by the Whig supporters of a Protestant succession
Act of Settlement 1701
The Act of Settlement is an act of the Parliament of England that was passed in 1701 to settle the succession to the English throne on the Electress Sophia of Hanover and her Protestant heirs. The act was later extended to Scotland, as a result of the Treaty of Union , enacted in the Acts of Union...
and is manifested in a variety of ways. Unsurprisingly it is to be found in his political poetry, most notably in the portrait of the proud, triple-crowned Romania, the companion of the tyranising Sir Burbon in stanzas 38-9 of the first Spenserian canto, and in the stanza devoted to the Roman Inquisition (12) in the second. Another unfavourable allusion to Catholic practice occurs in the second of his extracts from Ovid's Fasti where, following a reference to the naked priests of Faunus, Croxall departs from the original to observe that in place of outward observation of the naked truth, 'modern Rome, to scour us all from sin,/ Appoints a prying Priest to peep within'.
A more surprising context for the party line is in the preface to The Fables of Aesop. Here Croxall attacks the principles of interpretation of his immediate predecessor as fabulist, Sir Roger L'Estrange
Roger L'Estrange
Sir Roger L'Estrange was an English pamphleteer and author, and staunch defender of royalist claims. L'Estrange was involved in political controversy throughout his life...
, as ‘coined and suited to promote the growth, and serve the ends, of Popery and arbitrary power....In every political touch he shows himself to be the tool and hireling of the Popish faction'. L'Estrange's versions are as lively and colloquial as Croxall's while his commentaries are shorter and , if anything, less political. In fact, the rival author's real crime was to be a supporter of the Stuart
House of Stuart
The House of Stuart is a European royal house. Founded by Robert II of Scotland, the Stewarts first became monarchs of the Kingdom of Scotland during the late 14th century, and subsequently held the position of the Kings of Great Britain and Ireland...
regime, for which at one time he acted as press censor.
The Fair Circassian
Extracts from the first and second books of Ovid's FastiFasti (poem)
The Fasti is a six-book Latin poem by Ovid believed to have been left unfinished when the poet was exiled to Tomis by the emperor Augustus in the year 8...
were included in what was the nearest thing to a Collected Poems that Croxall ever published, the later editions of The Fair Circassian, which contained a miscellany of other pieces. The reason why such learned fare appeared in the context of what are otherwise love poems is that both extracts deal with scenes of attempted rape described with bawdy relish:
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- He rose and silent as the steps of death,
- On tiptoe stealing, held his breath:
- Till he had crept within the blissful bow'r
- That gave his utmost wishes to his pow'r.
- The neighb'ring turf with tender care he prest;
- Still lay the nymph, o'erwhelmed in downy rest:
- O'erjoyed the god her vesture upward drew
- And to the goal with furious vigour flew.
- The nymph awaken'd, strove with all her might
- To stop the eager dotard's fond delight,
- And, rolling sideways from his hot embrace,
- Scream'd out and fill'd with loud alarms the place.
- The silver moon, just breaking from a cloud,
- Show'd where the god in strange confusion stood,
- Too well provided for the feats of love
- And quite expos'd to all the laughing grove.
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The voyeuristic character of this extract reappears elsewhere in the collection, especially in the account of a naked girl taking a midnight dip, "Florinda seen while she was bathing". Add to these the suggestive ambiguity of the metaphors in his love poems to Sylvia and it is not difficult to understand why the poems were so often reissued or the controversy stirred up by the title poem that they accompany.
The Fair Circassian: a dramatic performance was first published in 1720. An adaptation of the biblical Song of Solomon, it consists of eight short sections written in couplets in which King Solomon and an imaginary slave-girl called Saphira engage in amorous dialogue. Embarrassed by the existence of such sensuous writing in their holy book, it was declared clerical opinion that this inspired scripture was emblematic of relations between the Messiah and the Church. Many in the clergy therefore did not take kindly to having it treated as a love poem and accused the author of writing licentiously. James Craig, a Scottish minister from Edinburgh, denounced the work in a poem complaining of the prostitution of genius, of which he takes Croxall's poem as a particularly flagrant example:
-
-
- Curss'd be he that the Circassian wrote,
- Perish his fame, contempt be all his lot,
- Who basely durst in execrable strains,
- Turn holy mysteries into impious scenes.
- (Spiritual Life: Poems on several divine subjects, 1751)
-
Knowing the risks to which his whole poetic output exposed him, Croxall took pains to conceal his authorship both by using pseudonyms and providing false information about the work's origin. As well as the transparent fiction that the satires on Harley are examples of ancient poetry, their discovery and editing are ascribed to Nestor Ironside. The Fair Circassian is supposedly the work of 'A Gentleman Commoner of Oxford' who had lately died, one is led to believe in the preface, of love for one of the queen's maids of honour. Even his final poem, "The Royal Manual", of which any clergyman would not be ashamed, he endeavoured to pass off as discovered among the manuscripts of Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman . As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert...
. Such was the notoriety of his poetical output and the power of his named literary productions, however, that it was impossible to keep their origin hidden for long.
Influences
Croxall's poetry is largely the output of a single decade at the tail end of a period when writing (with astute dedications) was one avenue to political advancement. Contemporary judgements of his writing summed it up as such. His poetry only began to be reassessed at a period when critics turned their attention to examining contrary currents within the 'Augustan age'Augustan poetry
In Latin literature, Augustan poetry is the poetry that flourished during the reign of Caesar Augustus as Emperor of Rome, most notably including the works of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. In English literature, Augustan poetry is a branch of Augustan literature, and refers to the poetry of the...
. In examining the poetry of the period for evidence of trends leading towards the Romantic movement, the scholar William Lyon Phelps
William Lyon Phelps
William Lyon Phelps was an American author, critic and scholar. He taught the first American university course on the modern novel. He was a well-known speaker who drew large crowds...
groups such authors as Croxall, Lady Winchilsea and Allan Ramsay
Allan Ramsay (poet)
Allan Ramsay was a Scottish poet , playwright, publisher, librarian and wig-maker.-Life and career:...
as 'currents flowing in a direction opposite to the general stream; individualities who were really out of sympathy with the Augustans, but who were overpowered by the prevailing fashion partly because the fashion was so strong, partly because no one of them had sufficient force publicly to throw off the shackles'. He goes on to comment of Croxall that 'he seems to have been wholly out of sympathy with the spirit of the age, even consciously and defiantly so' (p. 28).
Phelps finds evidence for this judgement in Croxall's evident fascination with the poetry of Spenser, but Croxall was only one of several following the example of Prior's 1706 "Ode, Humbly Inscrib'd to the Queen". All that can be claimed for him is that his imitation is closer to the original and the ancestor of later works claiming to be new additions to the Faerie Queene. The only other poem manifesting some degree of originality is The Fair Circassian which Croxall describes in his preface as 'a kind of opera or dramatic performance'. The model he had in mind was Handel
George Frideric Handel
George Frideric Handel was a German-British Baroque composer, famous for his operas, oratorios, anthems and organ concertos. Handel was born in 1685, in a family indifferent to music...
's recently performed and very successful pastoral opera Acis and Galatea, to a text written by the poets John Gay and (possibly) Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope was an 18th-century English poet, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third-most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare and Tennyson...
. Written at a time when authors were looking round for novel applications of the outworn tradition of Classical Pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...
writing, Croxall's amorous eclogue with its exotic Eastern setting takes the tradition forward to the vogue set by William Collins
William Collins (poet)
William Collins was an English poet. Second in influence only to Thomas Gray, he was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century...
' Oriental Eclogues (1742) and the considerable influence this had on the subject matter of the Romantic poets.