versity. 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,[1] 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
- ↑ This satire, entitled Character of a certain ugly old Priest, is in prose, and was written in 1676, two years after Oldham returned home. It is so offensively coarse that there is some difficulty in believing the traditional story that he designed it as a portrait of his father. Its exaggerations of personal ugliness are grotesque and preposterous, and look more like a hideous conception of the writer's fancy than a picture drawn from real life. The priest is described as a solecism in nature, with a foul skin, a yawning mouth, and a monstrous nose; a gruff voice that has preached half his parish deaf; a prodigious skull that would furnish a whole regiment of round-heads; and a pair of ears of a length so inordinate that he binds them over his crown at night instead of quilt night-caps. Had Oldham meant to gibbet his father in this outrageous caricature, he would, in all probability, have touched upon some of the points of temper or disposition which may be presumed to have provoked so graceless a satire; but there is not a single allusion throughout the whole that warrants such a supposition
