Page:Babell, a satirical poem (1830).djvu/25

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PREFATORY NOTICE.
xiii

Doctor Pitcairne, whatever reasons he might give the world to suppose him an atheist, was, however, unwilling to be thought one. Wodrow, in the above notice, admits that he professed the belief of a deity, and, in a passage in his Analecta, he gives an account of the Doctor publicly vindicating this belief in a law-suit against the Rev. Dr. Webster of Edinburgh, who had openly called him an atheist.

Dr. Pitcairne, as a violent Jacobite, and therefore inimical to Presbytery, whose ministers were the chief promulgators of the calumny of atheism against him, readily found in their private characters and conduct, and in the ceremonies and government of the Kirk, familiar subjects for his satire. But the General Assembly of 1692, from its unruly character, appears to have afforded him the most ample materiel for ridicule: To it we owe the production of his witty comedy of The Assembly, and of the following poem of Babell, in both of which, the characters are sustained by its leading members. The comedy has gone through several editions, while the poem, which may fairly rank among the most humorous and descriptive Satires of the time, is now for the first time printed.[1]

With regard to its poetical merits, it would be disingenuous to be too critical: although, in many places, there is an apparent neglect of the niceties of quantity and rhythm, yet such irregularities evidently proceed, not from a want of taste and ability, but rather from such a close attention to

  1. ↑ It may be remarked that Meston, a satirical writer of the succeeding century, must have possessed a copy of Babell, as he has been guilty of appropriating large portions of it in his poem of The Knight of the Kirk.
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