In his youth he had read the great poets, and had studied Milton especially with the ardour of intense admiration.

Nothing ever made him so angry as Johnson's Life of Milton.

"Oh!" he cries, "I could thrash his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket." Churchill had made a great--far too great--an impression on him, when he was a Templar.

Of Churchill, if of anybody, he must be regarded as a follower, though only in his earlier and less successful poems.

In expression he always regarded as a model the neat and gay simplicity of Prior.