substantial poem, The Country Justice, published in three parts between 1774-7. Then in 1777 he was installed as a prebendary of Wells Cathedral but died at the age of 45 two years later. Writing John Langhorne wrote with great diligence and produced a large number of works in both prose and verse which were much read at the time but very quickly went out of fashion again. His poetry was summed up by a later writer as characterised by "a delicious sweetness, an harmonious flow of diction, tender and lovely sentiment, and a pathos, mild, delicate, graceful and elegant.". But even friendly writers had to admit that "his chief faults are redundant decoration and an affectation of false and unnecessary ornament". On account of this, his literary and political enemies made of him a new candidate for inclusion in Alexander Pope's satire The Dunciad. In Charles Churchill's "The Candidate", Langhorne is characterised as "simple in his lay" and a sleeping partner "with Dullness on her throne". Hugh Kelly's "Thespis" condemns his "recreant name/ to drive with Flecknoe down the sink of fame". His heavy drinking was also frequently mentioned. Two of Langhorne's works in particular were singled out later for praise. The "Fables of Flora" (1771) have the novel approach of using interactions between plants to deliver moral lessons, although there are rare precedents in Aesop's Fables, of which the best-known example is "The Oak and the Reed". Langhorne's floral debates, however, are related at greater length with overwrought and often ludicrous imagery: Where prostrate vales, and blushing meads, And bending mountains own his sway, While Persia's lord his empire leads And bids the trembling world obey, While blood bedews the straining bow, And conquest rends the scatter'd air. Turning to The Country Justice, Robert Chambers accounts it to be "the only poem of Langhorne's which has a cast of originality…He seems to have anticipated George Crabbe in painting the rural life of England in true colours." William Wordsworth also praised the poem enthusiastically for the way it "brought the Muse into the company of common life". Wordsworth might well be impressed, since that agenda was his own. Another critic, however, sees Langhorne as anticipating something of Wordsworth's nature mysticism too, as it is foreshadowed in his "Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey". In the same spirit, Langhorne's "Inscription on the door of a study" exhorts the reader