Churchill Charles

Churchill, Charles (1731-1764), an English satirist, who, after being educated at Westminster, and entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, brought his university career to a full stop by a Fleet marriage. He then read for the Church, and was ordained priest in 1756, and on his father's death in 1758 was appointed to the curacy and lectureship of St. John's, Westminster, but three years afterwards, his conduct, startling even for those times, drew upon him the censure of the dean, whereupon he at once resigned his appointment and threw off the clerical character. His first published poem, The Rosciad, a satire upon actors, and his Apology, an attack upon the critics of the Rosciad, came out in this year. In 1762 he published The Night, in which he apologised for separating from his wife, and The Ghost, in which he ridiculed Johnson. In the Prophecy of Famine he ridiculed the Scots, and his Epistle to Hogarth is said to have moved the caricaturist deeply. In 1764 appeared The Times, the last of his works of any merit, and in the autumn of the same year he went to Boulogne, where he died of a fever a few days after his arrival.