Henry James Pye

Henry James Pye (1745–1813). Portrait by Samuel James Arnold (1800-1808 fl.). courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Henry James Pye (20 February 1745 - 11 August 1813) was an English poet, who served as Poet Laureate from 1790 until his death.

Life

Overview

Pye was a country gentleman of Berkshire, who published Poems on Various Subjects and Alfred: An epic, translated the Poetics of Aristotle, and was Poet Laureate from 1790. In the last capacity he wrote official poems of ludicrous dullness, and was generally a jest and a byword in literary circles.

Youth and education

Pye was born in London, the son of Mary (James) (died 1806) and Henry Pye (1710-1766) of Faringdon, Berkshire.

From an early age he cultivated literary tastes, and his main object in life was to obtain recognition as a poet.

He was educated at home until 1762, when he entered Magdalen College, Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner. He earned an M.A. on 3 July 1766, and a D.C.L. at the installation of Lord North as chancellor in 1772.

On the death of his father, on 2 March 1766, Pye inherited the estates at Faringdon and debts of £50,000. His resources long suffered through his efforts to pay off this large sum. His house at Faringdon was burned down soon after his succession to it, and the expenses of rebuilding increased his embarrassments.

He married at the age of 21, and initially devoted himself to the pursuits of a country gentleman. He joined the Berkshire militia, and was an active county magistrate. In 1784 he was elected M.P. for Berkshire. Soon afterwards his financial difficulties compelled him to sell his ancestral estate, and he retired from parliament at the dissolution of 1790.

Early poetry

His earliest publication was an "Ode on the Birth of the Prince of Wales" in the Oxford collection of 1762, and he has been doubtfully credited with The Rosciad of Covent Garden, 4to, a poem published in London in the same year. In 1766 appeared Beauty: A poetical essay, a didactic lucubration in heroic verse, which well exemplifies Pye's pedestrian temper.

There followed Elegies on Different Occasions, 1768; The Triumph of Fashion: A vision, 1771; Farringdon Hill: A poem in Two Books, 1774; The Progress of Refinement, in 3 parts, 1783; Shooting, 1784; and Aeriphorion, 1784 (on balloons). Pye collected most of them in 2 octavo volumes, as Poems on Various Subjects, 1787. Meanwhile, in 1775, he exhibited somewhat greater intelligence in a verse translation, with notes, of Six Olympic Odes of Pindar, being those omitted by Mr. West. He pursued the same vein in a translation of the Poetics of Aristotle in 1788, which he reissued, with a commentary, in 1792. His Amusement: A poetical essay appeared in 1790.

Poet laureate

In 1790 Pye was appointed poet laureate, in succession to Thomas Warton, and held the office for 23 years. He doubtless owed his good fortune to the support he had given the prime minister, Pitt, while he sat in the House of Commons. No selection could have more effectually deprived the post of reputable literary associations, and a satire, "Epistle to the Poet Laureate," 1790, gave voice to the scorn with which, in literary circles, the announcement of his appointment was received.

Pye performed his new duties with the utmost regularity, and effected a change in the conditions of tenure of the office by accepting a fixed salary of £27 in lieu of the ancient dole of a tierce of canary. Every year on the king's birthday he produced an ode breathing the most irreproachable patriotic sentiment, expressed in language of ludicrous tameness. His earliest effort was so crowded with allusions to vocal groves and feathered choirs that George Steevens, on reading it, broke out into the lines:

And when the pie was opened
    The birds began to sing;
And wasn't that a dainty dish
    To set before a king?

Occasionally Pye essayed more ambitious topics in his War Elegies of Tyrtæus imitated (1795); Naucratia, or Naval Dominion (1798), dedicated to King George; and Carmen Seculare for the year 1800 (1799). What has been described as his magnum opus, Alfred, an epic poem in six books, appeared in 1801, and was dedicated to Addington.

Pye published in 1802 Verses on Several Subjects: Written in the vicinity of Stoke Park in the Summer and Autumn of 1801. In 1810 appeared his Translation of the Hymns and Epigrams of Homer.

In 1792 he was appointed a police magistrate for Westminster. One of his most useful publications was a Summary of the Duties of a Justice of the Peace out of Sessions, 1808 (4th edit. 1827).

The Ireland Shakespeare forgeries forgeries at first completely deceived him, and on 25 Feb. 1795 he signed, with others, a paper testifying his belief in their authenticity. But when he was requested to write a prologue for the production at Drury Lane of Ireland's play of Vortigern (absurdly ascribed to Shakespeare), he expressed himself too cautiously to satisfy William IrIreland, who deemed it prudent to suppress Pye's effort.

Dramatist

Pye also interested himself in the drama. On 19 May 1794 his 3-act historical tragedy The Siege of Meaux was acted at Covent Garden, and was repeated four times. ‘The Inquisitor,’ a tragedy in five acts, altered from the German (‘Diego und Leonor’) by Pye and James Petit Andrews, was published in 1798, but was never performed, because its production on the stage was anticipated by that of Holcroft's adaptation of the same German play under the same English title at the Haymarket on 25 June 1798.

On 25 Jan. 1800 Adelaide, a 2nd tragedy by Pye, based on episodes in Lyttelton's Henry II, was performed at Drury Lane, with Kemble as Prince Richard, and Mrs. Siddons as the heroine. The great actor and actress never appeared, wrote Genest, to less advantage. On 29 October 1805 an inanimate comedy, A Prior Claim, in which his son-in-law, Samuel James Arnold, co-operated, was also produced at Drury Lane.

In 1807 Pye published Comments on the Commentators of Shakespeare, with Preliminary Observations on his Genius and Writings, which he dedicated to his friend, Governor John Penn..

Private life

Pye was twice married. His 1st wife, Mary (died 1796), daughter of Colonel William Hook, wrote a farce, The Capricious Lady, which was acted at Drury Lane on 10 May 1771 for the benefit of Mr. Inchbald and Mrs. Morland. It was not printed. By her, Pye had 2 daughters — Mary Elizabeth (died 1834), wife of Captain Jones of the 35th regiment; and Matilda Catherine (died 1851), who married Samuel James Arnold in 1802.

Pye married, in November 1801, Martha, daughter of W. Corbett, by whom he had a son, Henry John (1802–1884), and a daughter, Jane Anne, wife of Francis Willington of Tamworth, Staffordshire. The son succeeded in 1833, under the will of a distant cousin, to the estate of Clifton Hall, Staffordshire.

In May 1813 an edition of Pye's select writings in 6 volumes was announced, but happily nothing more was heard of it. He died at Pinner, in Middlesex.

Writing

Pye read the classics and wrote English verse assiduously, but he was destitute alike of poetic feeling or power of expression. "The poetical Pye," as Sir Walter Scott called him, was "eminently respectable in everything but his poetry;" in that he was contemptible, and incurred deserved ridicule. For many years he was linked in a scornful catch-phrase, "Pye et parvus Pybus." The latter was another poetaster, Charles Small Pybus, long M.P. for Dover, who published, in pretentious shape, a poem called The Sovereign, in 1800, and was castigated by Porson in the Monthly Review for that year. Both Pye and Pybus figure in the epigram, attributed to Porson:

Poetis nos lætamur tribus,

Pye, Petro Pindar, Parvo Pybus.

Si ulterius ire pergis,

Adde his Sir James Bland Burges.

Byron refers sarcastically to Pye in "The Vision of Judgment," stanza xcii.:

The monarch, mute till then, exclaim'd ‘What! what!

Pye come again? No more — no more of that!’

Mathias, in his Pursuits of Literature, was no less inimical. Southey, who succeeded Pye as poet laureate, wrote, on 24 December 1814, "I have been rhyming as doggedly and dully as if my name had been Henry James Pye."

Besides the works enumerated, Pye issued a respectable translation of Bürger's Lenore (1795), and two works of fiction, ‘interspersed with anecdotes of well-known characters,’ respectively entitled The Democrat (1795), 2 vols., and The Aristocrat (1799), 2 vols. He revised Francis's ‘Odes of Horace’ in 1812, and a copy of Sir James Bland Burges's Richard I, with manuscript notes and emendations by Pye, is in the British Museum.

Cambridge History of English and American Literature: "For traditional dignity of form, though certainly for little other merit, a small band of professed epic writers may have precedence, and they may themselves be as properly headed by the laureate for nearly a quarter of a century, Henry James Pye, who crowned the efforts in all sorts of verse which he made during close on that time — prize poems and Pindaric odes, verse-essays on beauty and ballooning, and the dreadful duty ditties of his post — with an Alfred in 6 books of technically faultless, but poetically null, 18th- century couplets. Pye, though a convenient butt for the usual anti-laureate jokes, was, in fact, not so much a bad poet as no poet at all. He was not specially rhetorical, or specially silly, or specially extravagant, or ridiculously sentimental and pseudo-romantic. His house was the house of typically 18th century verse, empty and swept of all poetical life, not even garnished by any poetical stuff, not inhabited by devils at all — but simply empty. He is thus an interesting figure in a historical museum of the subject."

Recognition

Pye was made Poet Laureate in 1790, perhaps as a reward for his faithful support of William Pitt the Younger in the House of Commons. The appointment was looked on as ridiculous, and his birthday odes were widely mocked.

He was the earliest poet laureate to receive a fixed salary (of £27) instead of the historic tierce of Canary wine (though it was still a fairly nominal payment; then as now the Poet Laureate had to look to extra sales generated by the prestige of the office to make significant money from the Laureateship).

Publications

Poetry

• Beauty: A poetical essay, in three parts. London: T. Becket / P.A. de Hondt, 1766.
• Elegies on Different Occasions. London: C. Bathurst, 1768.
• The Progress of Refinement: A poem in three parts. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1783.
• Shooting: A poem. London: J. Davis, for R. Faulder; and Mess. Prince and Cooke, Oxford, 1784.
• Poems on Various Subjects. (2 volumes), London: John Stockdale, 1787. Volume I, Volume II.
• Naucratia; or, Naval dominion. London: W. Bulmer, for George Nicol, 1798.
• Carmen Seculare: for the year 1800. London: W. Bulmer, for J. Wright, 1800.
• Alfred: An epic poem, in six books. London: W. Bulmer, for J. Wright, 1801.

Plays

• The Siege of Meauz: A tragedy in three acts. London: G. Nicol, 1794.
• Adelaide: A tragedy in five acts. London: John Stockdale, 1800.

Novels

• The Democrat; or, Intrigues and adventures of Jean le Noir. London: C. Rivington, 1795.
• The Aristocrat. (2 volumes), London: Sampson Low, 1799.

Non-fiction

• Amusement: A political essay. London: John Stockdale, 1790.
• A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle. London: John Stockdale, 1792.
• Sketches on Various Subjects: Moral, literary, and political. London: J. Bell, 1797.
• The Sportsman's Dictionary. London: John Stockdale, 1805.
• Summary of the Duties of a Justice of the Peace out of Sessions. London: J. Hatchard, 1808.

Books on Shakespeare

• Comments on the Commentators of Shakespear. London: J.D. Dewick, for Tipper & Richards, 1807.

Translated

• Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle. London: John Stockdale, 1788.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of British poets
• Timeline of British poetry

Preceded by Thomas Warton

British Poet Laureate 1790-1813

Succeeded by Robert Southey

References

•  Lee, Sidney (1896) "Pye, Henry James" in Lee, Sidney Dictionary of National Biography 47 London: Smith, Elder, pp. 68-70  . Wikisource, Web, Oct. 1, 2016.</ref>

External links

Poems

• "Written on a Lady's Fan"
• "Winter: An Elegy"
• Henry James Pye (1745-1813) info & 15 poems at English Poetry 1579-1830
• Henry James Pye at PoemHunter (81 poems)
• Henry James Pye at AllPoetry (85 poems)
• Henry James Pye at Poetry Nook (165 poems)

Books

• Henry James Pye works at Internet Archive
• Henry James Pye at Amazon.com

About

• Henry James Pye in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• Henry James Pye in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Pye, Henry James