But there was still another reason why Tate was preferred to Congreve.  Dorset was too practised a courtier not to study the tastes of his master to good purpose.  A liking for the stage, or a lively sense of poetic excellence, was not among the preferences of King William.  The Laureate was sub-purveyor of amusement for the court; but there was no longer a court to amuse, and the King himself never once in his reign entered a theatre.  The piety of Queen Mary rendered her a rare attendant at the play-house.  Plays were therefore no longer wanted.  A playwright could not amuse.  Congreve was a dramatist who had never exhibited even passable talent for other forms of poetical composition.  But Tate’s limited gifts, displayed to Dorset’s satisfaction in various encomiastic verses addressed to himself, were fully equal to the exigencies of the office under the new order of things; he was by profession a eulogist, not a dramatist.  He was a Tory; and the King was out of humor with the Whigs.  He was pretentiously moral and exemplary of life and pen, and so suited the Queen.  The duties of the office were conformed, as far as practicable, to the royal tastes.  Their scene was transferred from the play-house to the church.  On the anniversaries of the birthdays of the two sovereigns, and upon New Year’s day, the Laureate was expected to have ready congratulatory odes befitting the occasion, set to music by the royal organist, and sung after service in the Chapel Royal of St. James.  Similar duties were required when great victories were to be celebrated, or national calamities to be deplored.  In short, from writing dramas to amuse a merry monarch and his courtiers, an office not without dignity, the Laureate sunk into a hired writer of adulatory odes; a change in which originated that prevalent contempt for the laurel which descended from the era of Tate to that of Southey.

And yet the odes were in no sense more thoroughly Pindaric than in the circumstance of their flatteries being bought and paid for at a stated market value.  The triumphal lyrics of Pindar himself were very far from being those spontaneous and enthusiastic tributes to the prowess of his heroes, which the vulgar receive them for.  Hear the painful truth, as revealed by the Scholiast.[2] Pytheas of AEgina had conquered in rough-and-tumble fight all antagonists in the Pancratium.  Casting about for the best means of perpetuating his fame, he found the alternative to lie between a statuette to be erected in the temple of the hero-god, or one of the odes of the learned Theban.  Choosing the latter, he proceeded to the poet’s shop, cheapened the article, and would have secured it without hesitation, had not the extortionate bard demanded the sum of three drachmas,[3] nearly equal to half a dollar, for the poem, and refused to bate a fraction.  The disappointed bargainer left, and was for some days decided in favor of the brazen image, which could be had at half the price.  But reflecting that