Churchill passed one quiet
domestic year under the paternal roof. At its termination--for reasons
which are not known--he retired to Sunderland, in the north of England,
and seems there to have applied himself enthusiastically to the study of
poetry--commencing, at the same time, a course of theological reading,
with a view to the Church. He remained in Sunderland till the year 1753,
when he came back to London to take possession of a small fortune which
accrued to him through his wife. He had now reached the age of
twenty-two, and had been three years married.
During the residence in the metropolis which succeeded, he frequented the
theatres, and came thus in contact with a field where he was to gather
his earliest and most untarnished laurels. In "The Rosciad," we find the
results of several years' keen and close observation of the actors of the
period, collected into one focus, and pointed and irradiated by the power
of genius. As Scott, while carelessly galloping in his youth through
Liddesdale, and listening to ballads and old-world stories, was "making
himself" into the mighty minstrel of the border--so this big, clumsy,
overgrown student, seated in the pit of Drury Lane, or exalted to the
one-shilling gallery of Covent Garden, was silently growing into the
greatest poet of the stage that, perhaps, ever lived.
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