“ He deprecated criticism by showing every possible civility to Churchill, who became a terror to the actors. Thomas Davies wrote to Garrick attributing his blundering in the part of Cymbeline “to my accidentally seeing Mr Churchill in the pit, it rendering me confused and unmindful of my business.” Churchill’s satire made him many enemies, and inquiries into his way of life provided abundant matter for retort. In Night, an Epistle to Robert Lloyd (1761) , he answered the attacks made on him, offering by way of defence the argument that any faults were better than hypocrisy. ”

“ In the Rosciad he had given warm praise to Mrs Pritchard, Mrs Cibber and Mrs Clive, but no leading London actor, with the exception of David Garrick, had escaped censure, and in the Apology Garrick was clearly threatened. ”

“ Other poems are “The Conference” (1763) ; “The Author” (1763) , highly praised by Churchill’s contemporaries; “Gotham” (1764) , a poem on the duties of a king, didactic rather than satiric in tone; “The Candidate” (1764) , a satire on John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, one of Wilkes’s bitterest enemies, whom he had already denounced for his treachery in the Duellist (Bk. iii.) as “too infamous to have a friend”; “The Farewell” (1764) ; “The Times” (1764) ; “Independence,” and an unfinished “Journey.”
In October 1764 he went to Boulogne to join Wilkes. ”