William Tasker (poet)

Tasker was a friend of Dr. William Hunter, attended his lectures, and studied botany in the gardens at Kew.

Boswell wrote, "The bard was a lank, bony figure, with short black hair; he was writhing himself in agitation while Johnson read, and, showing his teeth in a grin of earnestness, exclaimed in broken sentences and in a keen, sharp tone, 'Is that poetry, sir—is it Pindar?'".

He said that his "unletter'd brother-in-law" had obtained the sequestration in an "illegal mode" through "merciless and severe persecutions and litigations".

[2] Tasker thought the results of the Seven Years' War (1754–63) had only been the growth of corruption and luxury at home.

[6] He wrote several poems on the Anglo-French War (1778–83) in which he represented the Earl of Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, as being at the centre of a selfish and corrupt network.

[7] He complemented the Duchess of Devonshire in the poem for wearing riding dress at the Cox-heath military camp, calling her the "Genius of Britain".

[12] The Gentleman's magazine called Tasker's play Arviragus, a Tragedy (1796), written during the French Revolution, a "bold attempt towards a national drama", and pointed out the contemporary relevance,[13] the British king Aviragus, the principal character, is represented to be a gallant warrior and a patriot-king, reigning over a free and warlike people; and both are represented as uniting their utmost efforts to resist foreign invasion.

In the years that followed the magazine would praise Tasker's work as "so well calculated to animate loyal Britons against invaders, and to inspire the necessary unanimity and concord ... exceedingly well adapted to the present times; since it breathes a three-fold spirit of Poetry, Loyalty, and Patriotism."

the Gentleman's Magazine serialised the 1780 Ode to the Warlike Genius of Great Britain over nine editions from December 1798 to August 1799.