the opinions of the men by whom he was after-publish his translation; that he certainly had as wards befriended. Mr. Addison, however he hated the men then in power, suffered his friendship to prevail over his public spirit, and gave in the "Spectator" such praises of Tickell's poem, that when, after having long wished to peruse it, I laid hold on it at last, I thought it unequal to the honours which it had received, and found it a piece to be approved rather than admired. But the hope excited by a work of genius being general and indefinite, is rarely gratified. It was read at that time with so much favour, that six editions were sold. At the arrival of King George he sung "The Royal Progress;" which being inserted in the "Spectator" is well known; and of which it is just to say, that it is neither high nor low. Soon after it much right to translate any author as myself; and that publishing both was entering on a fair stage. I then added, that I would not desire him to look over my first book of the Iliad,' because he had looked over Mr. Tickell's; but could wish to have the benefit of his observations on the second, which I had then finished, and which Mr. Tickell had not touched upon. Accordingly I sent him the second book the next morning; and Mr. Addison a few days after returned it, with very high commendations. was generally known that Mr. publishing the first book of the Dr. Young in the street; and, upon our falling into that subject, the Doctor expressed a great deal of surprise at Tickell's having had such a translation so long by him. He said, that it was inconceivable to him, and that there must be some mistake in the matter; that each used to communicate to the other whatever verses they wrote, even to the least things; that Tickell could not have been busied in so long a work there without his knowing something of the Addison declared that the rival versions were matter; and that he had never heard a single both good, but that Tickell's was the best that word of it till on this occasion. The surprise ever was made; and with Addison, the wits, of Dr. Young, together with what Steele has his adherents and followers, were certain to said against Tickell, in relation to this affair, concur. Pope does not appear to have been make it highly probable that there was some much dismayed; "for," says he, "I have the underhand dealing in that business; and indeed town, that is the mob, on my side." But he Tickell himself, who is a very fair worthy man, remarks, that “it is common for the smaller has since in a manner as good as owned it to me. party to make up in diligence what they want When it was introduced into a conversation bein numbers; he appeals to the people as his tween Mr. Tickell and Mr. Pope, by a third proper judges; and, if they are not inclined to person, Tickell did not deny it; which, concondemn him, he is in little care about the high-sidering his honour and zeal for his departed flyers at Button's." The poetical incident of most importance in Tickell's life was his publication of the first book of the " Iliad," as translated by himself, an apparent opposition to Pope's " Homer," of which the first part made its entrance into the world at the same time. Pope did not long think Addison an impartial judge; for he considered him as the writer of Tickell's version. The reasons for his suspicion I will literally transcribe from Mr. Spence's Collection. "There had been a coldness (said Mr. Pope) between Mr. Addison and me for some time; and we had not been in company together, for a good while, any where but at Button's Coffeehouse, where I used to see him almost every day. On his meeting me there one day in particular, he took me aside, and said he should be glad to dine with me, at such a tavern, if I stayed till those people were gone (Budgell and Philips). We went accordingly; and after dinner Mr. Addison said, 'That he had wanted for some time to talk with me; that his friend Tickell had formerly, whilst at Oxford, translated the first book of the Iliad ;' that he designed to print it, and had desired him to look it over; that he must therefore beg that I would not desire him to look over my first book, because, if he did, it would have the air of doubledealing.' I assured him that I did not at all take it ill of Mr. Tickell that he was going to friend, was the same as owning it." Upon these suspicions, with which Dr. Warburton hints that other circumstances concurred, Pope always in his "Art of Sinking" quotes this book as the work of Addison. To compare the two translations would be tedious; the palm is now given universally to Pope; but I think the first lines of Tickell's were rather to be preferred; and Pope seems to have since borrowed something from them in the correction of his own. When the Hanover succession was disputed, Tickell gave what assistance his pen would supply. His "Letter to Avignon" stands high among party poems; it expresses contempt without coarseness, and superiority without insolence. It had the success which it deserved, being five times printed. He was now intimately united to Mr. Addison, who, when he went into Ireland as secretary to the Lord Sunderland, took him thither and employed him in public business; and when (1717) afterwards he rose to be secretary of state, made him under secretary. Their friendship seems to have continued without abatement; for when Addison died, he left him the charge of publishing his works, with a solemn recommendation to the patronage of Craggs. To these works he prefixed an Elegy on the Author, which could owe none of its beauties to the assistance which might be suspected to have strengthened or embellished his earlier compositions; but neither he nor Addison ever produced nobler lines than are contained in the third and fourth paragraphs; nor is a more sublime or more elegant funeral-poem to be found in the whole compass of English literature. He was afterwards (about 1725) made secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland, a place of great honour; in which he continued till 1740, when he died on the 23d of April, at Bath. Of the poems yet unmentioned the longest is "Kensington Gardens," of which the versification is smooth and elegant, but the fiction unskilfully compounded of Grecian deities and Gothic fairies. Neither species of those exploded beings could have done much; and when they are brought together they only make each other contemptible. To Tickell, however, cannot be refused a high place among the minor poets: nor should it be forgotten that he was one of the contributors to the "Spectator." With respect to his personal character, he is said to have been a man of gay conversation, at least a temperate lover of wine and company, and in his domestic relations without censure. OF Mr. HAMMOND, though he be well remembered as a man esteemed and caressed by the elegant and the great, I was at first able to obtain no other memorials than such as are supplied by a book called "Cibber's Lives of the Poets;" of which I take this opportunity to testify, that it was not written, nor, I believe, ever seen, by either of the Cibbers: but was the work of Robert Shiels, a native of Scotland, a man of very acute understanding, though with little scholastic education, who, not long after the publication of his work, died in London of a consumption. His life was virtuous, and his end was pious. Theophilus Cibber, then a prisoner for debt, imparted, as I was told, his name for ten guineas. The manuscript of Shiels is now in my possession. I have since found that Mr. Shiels, though he was no negligent inquirer, had been misled by false accounts; for he relates that James Hammond, the Author of the Elegies, was the son of a Turkey merchant, and had some office at the Prince of Wales's court, till love of a lady, whose name was Dashwood, for a time disordered his understanding. He was unextinguishably amorous, and his mistress inexorably cruel. Of this narrative, part is true and part false. He was the second son of Anthony Hammond, a man of note among the wits, poets, and parliamentary orators, in the beginning of this century, who was allied to Sir Robert Walpole by marrying his sister.* He was born This account is still erroneous. James Hammond, our Author, was of a different family, the second about 1710, and educated at Westminster school; but it does not appear that he was of any university. He was equerry to the Prince of Wales, and seems to have come very early into public notice, and to have been distinguished by those whose friendships prejudiced mankind at that time in favour of the man on whom they were bestowed; for he was the companion of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield. He is said to have divided his life between pleasure and books; in his retirement forgetting the town, and in his gayety losing the student. Of his literary hours all the effects are here exhibited, of which the Elegies were written very early, and the prologue not long before his death. In 1741, he was chosen into parliament for Truro, in Cornwall, probably one of those who were elected by the Prince's influence; and died next year, in June, at Stowe, the famous seat of Lord Cobham. His mistress long outlived him, and in 1779 died unmarried. character which her lover bequeathed her was, indeed, not likely to attract courtship. The The Elegies were published after his death; and while the writer's name was remembered with fondness, they were read with a resolution to admire them. The recommendatory preface of the editor son of Anthony Hammond, of Somersham-place, in the county of Huntingdon, Esq. See Gent. Mag. Vol. lvii. p. 780.-R. Mr. Cole gives. him to Cambridge. MSS. Athe ne Cantab. in Mus. Brit.-C. who was then believed, and is now affirmed, by Dr. Maty to be the Earl of Chesterfield, raised strong prejudices in their favour. Wilt thou in tears thy lover's corse attend? And all the pride of Asia's fragrant year; But of the prefacer, whoever he was, it may be reasonably suspected that he never read the poems; for he professes to value them for a very high species of excellence, and recommends them as the genuine effusions of the mind, which expresses a real passion in the language of nature. But the truth is, these Elegies have neither passion, nature, nor manners. Where there is fiction, there is no passion; he that describes himself as a shepherd, and his Neæra or Delia as a shepherdess, and talks of goats and lambs, feels no passion. He that courts his mistress with Roman imagery deserves to lose His verses are not rugged, but they have no her for she may with good reason suspect sweetness; they never glide in a stream of his sincerity. Hammond has few sentiments melody. Why Hammond or other writers have drawn from nature, and few images from thought the quatrain of ten syllables elegiac, it modern life. He produces nothing but frigid is difficult to tell. The character of the Elegy pedantry. It would be hard to find in all his is gentleness and tenuity; but this stanza has productions three stanzas that deserve to be re- been pronounced by Dryden, whose knowledge membered. of English metre was not inconsiderable, to be Like other lovers, he threatens the lady with the most magnificent of all the measures which dying; and what then shall follow? our language affords. Surely no blame can fall upon a nymph who rejected a swain of so little meaning. SOMERVILE. Or Mr. SOMERVILE's life I am not able to myself on this occasion.-Sublatum quærimus. say any thing that can satisfy curiosity. I can now excuse all his foibles; impute them He was a gentleman whose estate was in to age, and to distress of circumstances; the last Warwickshire: his house, where he was born of these considerations wrings my very soul to in 1692, is called Edston, a seat inherited from think on. For a man of high spirit, conscious a long line of ancestors; for he was said to be of having (at least in one production) generally of the first family in his county. He tells of pleased the world, to be plagued and threatened himself that he was born near the Avon's banks. by wretches that are low in every sense; to be He was bred at Winchester-school, and was forced to drink himself into pains of the body, elected fellow of New College. It does not ap-in order to get rid of the pains of the mind, is a pear that in the places of his education he ex-misery." hibited any uncommon proofs of genius or literature. His powers were first displayed in the country, where he was distinguished as a poet, a gentleman, and a skilful and useful justice of the peace. He died July 19, 1742, and was buried at Wotton, near Henley on Arden. His distresses need not be much pitied; his estate is said to have been fifteen hundred & year, which by his death devolved to Lord Somervile of Scotland. His mother, indeed, who lived till ninety, had a jointure of six hundred. It is with regret that I find myself not better enabled to exhibit memorials of a writer who at least must be allowed to have set a good example to men of his own class, by devoting part of his time to elegant knowledge; and who has shown by the subjects which his poetry has adorned, Ee that it is practicable to be at once a skilful sportsman and a man of letters. Somervile has tried many modes of poetry; and though perhaps he has not in any reached such excellence as to raise much envy, it may commonly be said at least, that "he writes very well for a gentleman." His serious pieces are sometimes elevated, and his trifles are sometimes elegant. In his verses to Addison, the couplet which mentions Clio is written with the most exquisite delicacy of praise; it exhibits one of those happy strokes that is seldom attained. In his Odes to Marlborough there are beautiful lines; but in the second ode he shows that he knew little of his hero, when he talks of his private virtues. His subjects are commonly such as require no great depth of thought or energy of expression. His Fables are generally stale, and therefore excite no curiosity. Of his favourite, "The Two Springs," the fiction is unnatural and the moral inconsequential. In his Tales there is too much coarseness, with too little care of language, and not sufficient rapidity of narration. His great work is his "Chase," which he undertook in his maturer age, when his ear was improved to the approbation of blank verse, of which however his two first lines gave a bad specimen. To this poem praise cannot be totally denied. He is allowed by sportsmen to write with great intelligence of his subject, which is the first requisite to excellence; and though it is impossible to interest the common readers of verse in the dangers or pleasures of the chase, he has done all that transition and variety could easily effect; and has with great propriety enlarged his plan by the modes of hunting used in other countries. With still less judgment did he choose blank verse as the vehicle of rural sports. If blank verse be not tumid and gorgeous, it is crippled prose; and familiar images in laboured language have nothing to recommend them but absurd novelty, which, wanting the attractions of nature, cannot please long. One excellence of" The Splendid Shilling" is, that it is short. Disguise can gratify no longer than it deceives. SAVAGE.* from those by whom they are possessed, should very often flatter the mind with expectations of felicity which they cannot give, raises no astonishment; but it seems rational to hope, that intellectual greatness should produce better effects; that minds qualified for great attainments should first endeavour their own benefit; and that they who are most able to teach others the way to happiness, should with most certainty follow it themselves. Ir has been observed in all ages, that the advan- | and adventitious, and therefore easily separable tages of nature or of fortune have contributed very little to the promotion of happiness; and that those whom the splendour of their rank or the extent of their capacity have placed upon the summits of human life, have not often given any just occasion to envy in those who look up to them from a lower station; whether it be that apparent superiority incites great designs, and great designs are naturally liable to fatal miscarriages, or that the general lot of mankind is misery, and the misfortunes of those whose eminence drew upon them an universal attention have been more carefully recorded, because they were more generally observed, and have in reality been only more conspicuous than those of others, not more frequent or more severe. But this expectation, however plausible, has been very frequently disappointed. The heroes of literary as well as civil history have been very often no less remarkable for what they have suffered, than for what they have achieved; and volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their un That affluence and power advantages extrinsic happy lives and untimely deaths. The nrst edition of this interesting narrative, according to Mr. Boswell, was published in 1744, by Roberts. The second, now before me, bears date 1748, and was published by Cave. Very few alterations were made by the Author when he added it to the present collection,-e. To these mournful narratives, I am about to add the life of Richard Savage, a man whose writings entitle him to an eminent rank in the classes of learning, and whose misfortunes claim a degree of compassion not always due to the unhappy, as they were often the consequences of the crimes of others, rather than his own. In the year 1697, Anne Countess of Maccleo field, having lived some time upon very uneasy | upon her. It was therefore not likely that she terms with her husband, thought a public con- would be wicked without temptation; that she fession of adultery the most obvious and expedi- would look upon her son from his birth with tious method of obtaining her liberty; and a kind of resentment and abhorrence; and, intherefore declared, that the child with which stead of supporting, assisting, and defending she was then great was begotten by the Earl him, delight to see him struggling with misery, Rivers. This, as may be imagined, made her or that she would take every opportunity of aghusband no less desirous of a separation than gravating his misfortunes, and obstructing his herself, and he prosecuted his design in the most resources, and with an implacable and restless effectual manner; for he applied not to the ec- cruelty continue her persecution from the first clesiastical courts for a divorce, but to the par- hour of his life to the last. liament for an act, by which his marriage might be dissolved, the nuptial contract totally annulled, and the children of his wife illegitimated. This act, after the usual deliberation, he obtained, though without the approbation of some, who considered marriage as an affair only cognizable by ecclesiastical judges;* and on March 3d was separated from his wife, whose fortune, which was very great, was repaid her, and who, having, as well as her husband, the liberty of making another choice, was in a short time married to Colonel Brett. While the Earl of Macclesfield was prosecuting this affair, his wife was, on the 10th of January, 1697-8, delivered of a son; and the Earl Rivers, by appearing to consider him as his own, left none any reason to doubt of the sincerity of her declaration; for he was his godfather, and gave him his own name, which was by his direction inserted in the register of St. Andrew's parish, in Holborn, but unfortunately left him to the care of his mother, whom, as she was now set free from her husband, he probably imagined likely to treat with great tenderness the child that had contributed to so pleasing an event. It is not indeed easy to discover what motives could be found to overbalance that natural affection of a parent, or what interest could be promoted by neglect or cruelty. The dread of shame or of poverty, by which some wretches have been incited to abandon or to murder their children, cannot be supposed to have affected a woman who had proclaimed her crimes and solicited reproach, and on whom the clemency of the legislature had undeservedly bestowed a fortune, which would have been very little diminished by the expenses which the care of her child could have brought Because we conceive that this is the first bill of that nature that hath passed, where there was not But whatever were her motives, no sooner was her son born, than she discovered a resolution of disowning him; and in a very short time removed him from her sight, by committing him to the care of a poor woman, whom she directed to educate him as her own, and enjoined never to inform him of his true parents. Such was the beginning of the life of Richard Savage. Born with a legal claim to honour and to affluence, he was in two months illegitimated by the parliament, and disowned by his mother, doomed to poverty and obscurity, and launched upon the ocean of life, only that he might be swallowed by its quicksands, or dashed upon its rocks. His mother could not indeed infect others with the same cruelty. As it was impossible to avoid the inquiries which the curiosity or tenderness of her relations made after her child, she was obliged to give some account of the measures she had taken; and her mother, the Lady Mason, whether in approbation of her design, or to prevent more criminal contrivances, engaged to transact with the nurse, to pay her for her care, and to superintend the education of the child. In this charitable office she was assisted by his godmother, Mrs. Lloyd, who, while she lived, always looked upon him with that tenderness which the barbarity of his mother made peculiarly necessary; but her death, which happened in his tenth year, was another of the misfortunes of his childhood; for though she kindly endeavoured to alleviate his loss by a legacy of three hundred pounds, yet, as he had none to prosecute his claim, to shelter him from oppression, or call in law to the assistance of justice, her will was eluded by the executors, and no part of the money was ever paid. He was, however, not yet wholly abandoned. The Lady Mason still continued her care, and directed him to be placed at a small grammarschool near St. Alban's, where he was called by the name of his nurse, without the least intimation that he had a claim to any other. Here he was initiated in literature, and passed a divorce first obtained in the Spiritual Court; through several of the classes, with what rapidity or with what applause cannot now be known. As he always spoke with respect of his master, it is probable that the mean rank in which he |