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1686-1740.

HIS ELEGY ON ADDISON.

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stands high among party-poems;16 it expresses contempt without coarseness, and superiority without insolence. It had the suc

cess 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 [1721] 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.17

He was afterwards (4 May, 1724) made Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland, a place of great honour; in which he continued till 1740, when he died on the 23rd of April at Bath.

Of the poems yet unmentioned the longest is 'Kensington for Pope, which your Iliad has weaken'd and secure your success. Nor think my opinion groundlessly swayed by my wishes, for I observe, as Prejudice cools, you grow in favour, and you are a better Poet now than when your Homer first came down. I am persuaded fully that your design cannot but succeed here, and it shall be my hearty desire and endeavour that it may. Dear Tickell yours most affectionately

My humble service to Mr. Addison and Sir Richa.

E. YOUNG.

16 An Epistle from a Lady in England to a Gentleman in Avignon. By Mr. Tickell.' Tonson, 1717, fol.

17" Addison's works came to my hands yesterday. I cannot but think it a very odd set of incidents that the book should be dedicated by a dead man [Addison] to a dead man [Craggs]; and even that the new patron [Earl of Warwick] to whom Tickell chose to inscribe his verses should be dead also before they were published. Had I been in the editor's place, I should have been a little apprehensive for myself, under a thought that every one who had any hand in that work was to die before the publication of it."-ATTERBURY to Pope, Oct. 15, 1721.

Gardens,'18 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

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18 First published in 1722. Let me add here that Tickell had undertaken a translation of Lucan. See note 4, p. 185.

19 His portrait, from the original at Queen's College, Oxford, is engraved (though poorly) in Harding's Biographical Mirror.'

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My excuse is, that I have title to your favour, as you were Mr. Addison's friend, and, in the most honourable part, his heir; and if he had thought of your coming to this kingdom, he would have bequeathed me to you.-SWIFT to Tickell, Sept. 18, 1725 (Scott's Swift, xix. 286, 2nd ed.).

His son, it is said by some, by others his grandson, was Richard Tickell, author of a clever Epistle [in verse] from the Honourable Charles Fox, partridge-shooting, to the Honourable John Townshend, cruising,' 1789. He was also a contributor to The Rolliad.' He died in 1793 by his own act, throwing himself from one of the uppermost windows of Hampton Court Palace into the garden.

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[Tickell] is only a poor, short-winded imitator of Addison, who had himself not above three or four notes in poetry-sweet enough indeed, like those of a German flute, but such as soon tire and satiate the ear with their frequent return. His ballad, however, of ‘Colin and Lucy' I always thought the prettiest in the world.--GRAY to Horace Walpole.

1

JAMES HAMMOND.

( 329 )

Birth

HAMMON D.

1710-1742.

Educated at Westminster School - Equerry to Frederick Prince of Wales His Elegies Death and Character.

2

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 negli

This is not correct. The work itself shows some revision by Theophilus Cibber; and Griffiths, the publisher of the work, in noticing this statement of Johnson's, asserts that Theophilus Cibber “did very punctually revise every sheet." (See 'Boswell by Croker,' p. 504 and p. 818.)

2 In Pearch's Collection of Poems,' i. 186, is a poem in blank verse, by "Robert Sheills," called 'The Power of Beauty,' wherein the Aspasia of Johnson's Irene is highly lauded. It is a clever imitation of Thomson's manner. Shiels assisted Johnson in his Dictionary, and was a Jacobite like Johnson.

3 The sum was twenty guineas. (See Griffiths's letter in Boswell by Croker,' p. 504.) To which I may add that the original receipt (which I have seen) was for 217. and dated 13th Nov. 1752, Cibber therein undertaking "to revise, correct, and improve a work now printing in four volumes," &c.-" that his name shall be made use of as the author of the said work, and be inserted accordingly in the title-page thereof and in any advertisements relative to it." The receipt was sold 20th April, 1849, at Puttick's auction rooms,

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