He was in the very situation for which he was peculiarly fitted by nature; and during some years his life was a series of triumphs.
Of him, as of several of his contemporaries, especially of Mulgrave and of Sprat, it may be said that his fame has suffered from the folly of those editors who, down to our own time, have persisted in reprinting his rhymes among the works of the British poets.

There is not a year in which hundreds of verses as good as any that he ever wrote are not sent in for the Newdigate prize at Oxford and for the Chancellor's medal at Cambridge.

His mind had indeed great quickness and vigour, but not that kind of quickness and vigour which produces great dramas or odes; and it is most unjust to him that his loan of Honour and his Epistle on the Battle of the Boyne should be placed side by side with Comus and Alexander's Feast.

Other eminent statesmen and orators, Walpole, Pulteney, Chatham, Fox, wrote poetry not better than his.

But fortunately for them, their metrical compositions were never thought worthy to be admitted into any collection of our national classics.
It has long been usual to represent the imagination under the figure of a wing, and to call the successful exertions of the imagination flights.
One poet is the eagle; another is the swan; a third modestly compares himself to the bee.