Poetising seems to have been as much a polite accomplishment of that age as letter-writing was of a later, and a smattering of science is of the present day.  Gentlemen tried to be poets, and poets gentlemen.  The consequence was, that both made fools of themselves.  Among the poetasters who belonged to the Kit-kat, we must mention Walsh, a country gentleman, member of Parliament, and very tolerable scholar.  He dabbled in odes, elegies, epitaphs, and all that small fry of the muse which was then so plentiful.  He wrote critical essays on Virgil, in which he tried to make out that the shepherds in the days of the Roman poet were very well-bred gentlemen of good education!  He was a devoted admirer and friend of Dryden, and he encouraged Pope in his earlier career so kindly that the little viper actually praised him!  Walsh died somewhere about 1709 in middle life.

We have not nearly done with the poets of the Kit-kat.  A still smaller one than Walsh was Stepney, who, like Garth, had begun life as a violent Tory and turned coat when he found his interest lay the other way.  He was well repaid, for from 1692 to 1706 he was sent on no less than eight diplomatic missions, chiefly to German courts.  He owed this preferment to the good luck of having been a schoolfellow of Charles Montagu, afterwards Earl of Halifax.  He died about 1707, and had as grand a monument and epitaph in Westminster Abbey as if he had been a Milton or Dryden.

When you meet a dog trotting along the road, you naturally expect that his master is not far off.  In the same way, where you find a poet, still more a poetaster, there you may feel certain you will light upon a patron.  The Kit-kat was made up of Maecenases and their humble servants; and in the same club with Addison, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and the minor poets, we are not at all surprised to find Sir Robert Walpole, the Duke of Somerset, Halifax, and Somers.

Halifax was, par excellence, the Maecenas of his day, and Pope described him admirably in the character of Bufo:—­

’Proud as Apollo, on his forked hill, Sat full-blown Bufo, puff’d by every quill; Fed with soft dedication all day long, Horace and he went hand in hand in song.’

The dedications poured in thickly.  Steele, Tickell, Philips, Smith, and a crowd of lesser lights, raised my lord each one on a higher pinnacle; and in return the powerful minister was not forgetful of the douceur which well-tuned verses were accustomed to receive.  He himself had tried to be a poet, and in 1703 wrote verses for the toasting-cups of the Kit-kat.  His lines to a Dowager Countess of ——­, are good enough to make us surprised that he never wrote any better.  Take a specimen:—­

    ’Fair Queen of Fop-land in her royal style;
     Fop-land the greatest part of this great isle! 
     Nature did ne’er so equally divide
     A female heart ’twixt piety and pride: 
     Her waiting-maids prevent the peep of day,
     And all in order at her toilet lay
     Prayer-books, patch-boxes, sermon-notes, and paint,
     At once t’improve the sinner and the saint.’