Charles Churchill was the most important satiric poet between Alexander Pope and Lord Byron. Undisciplined and rebellious, he produced an extraordinary amount of verse at an extremely rapid rate between 1760 and 1764--years in which he dominated the English literary scene. With a typical mixture of self-satire and self-aggrandizement, he summarized his methods of composition in Gotham: A Poem. Book II (1764): "Nothing of Books, and little known of men,/ When the mad fit comes on, I seize the pen, / Rough as they run, the rapid thoughts set down, / Rough as they run, discharge them on the Town." This irreverence toward establishment standards and this stress on spontaneity and independence pervaded not only Churchill's poetry but his life. Although a clergyman, he was notorious as a tippler, womanizer, "bruiser," and political rebel (although perhaps not a "radical" in the modern sense of the word). His political stance, which developed from...