Samuel Croxall

[5] Croxall's satirical target was the Tory politician of the day, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and the choice of poetical model was also politically motivated.

This was further underlined by Croxall's next political poem, An ode humbly inscrib'd to the king, occasion'd by His Majesty's most auspicious succession and arrival, once more using the Spenserian stanza and published in 1715.

As a reward for his loyal services at a time of disputed succession, Croxall was made chaplain in ordinary to King George I for the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court.

Gossip had it that Walpole had stood in the way to some ecclesiastical dignity which Croxall wished to obtain and found himself the object of veiled references to corrupt and wicked ministers of state in the sermon.

He also wrote the voluminous Scripture Politics: Being a View of the Original Constitution, and Subsequent Revolutions, in the Government Religious and Civil, of that people out of whom the SAVIOUR of the WORLD was to arise,[13] published in 1735 with "the design to make the Bible more easily understood".

Here Croxall attacks the principles of interpretation of his immediate predecessor as fabulist, Sir Roger L'Estrange, as "coined and suited to promote the growth, and serve the ends, of Popery and arbitrary power....In every political touch he shows himself to be the tool and hirelling of the Popish faction".

Extracts from the first and second books of Ovid's Fasti were included in what was the nearest thing to a Collected Poems that Croxall ever published, the later editions of The Fair Circassian, which contained a miscellany of other pieces.

[15] The reason why such learned fare appeared in the context of what are otherwise love poems is that both extracts deal with scenes of attempted rape described with bawdy relish: He rose and silent as the steps of death, On tiptoe stealing, held his breath: Till he had crept within the blissful bow'r That gave his utmost wishes to his pow'r.

The neighb'ring turf with tender care he prest; Still lay the nymph, o'erwhelmed in downy rest: O'erjoyed the god her vesture upward drew And to the goal with furious vigour flew.

The nymph awaken'd, strove with all her might To stop the eager dotard's fond delight, And, rolling sideways from his hot embrace, Scream'd out and fill'd with loud alarms the place.

Knowing the risks to which his whole poetic output exposed him, Croxall took pains to conceal his authorship both by using pseudonyms and providing false information about the work's origin.

[16] Croxall's poetry is largely the output of a single decade at the tail end of a period when writing (with astute dedications) was one avenue to political advancement.

In examining the poetry of the period for evidence of trends leading towards the Romantic movement, the scholar William Lyon Phelps groups such authors as Croxall, Lady Winchilsea and Allan Ramsay as 'currents flowing in a direction opposite to the general stream; individualities who were really out of sympathy with the Augustans, but who were overpowered by the prevailing fashion partly because the fashion was so strong, partly because no one of them had sufficient force publicly to throw off the shackles'.

The model he had in mind was Handel's recently performed and very successful pastoral opera Acis and Galatea, to a text written by the poets John Gay and (possibly) Alexander Pope.