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 censure. 19

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.'

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.

[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.

JAMES HAMMOND.

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.3 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.

gent 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.

4

6

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 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 friendship 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 gaiety 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.

Catherine Dashwood, better known as Kitty Dashwood, afterwards one of the bedchamber women to Charlotte, queen of George III. Walpole calls her (writing in 1761) "the famous old beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites." -Letter to Mann, Sept. 10, 1761.

Amidst the gossip of the last century, I shall perhaps be forgiven for recording that my old acquaintance Lady Corke, who died in 1840 at the age of ninety-four, told me that she had known Kitty Dashwood very well, and that Hammond undoubtedly died for love: "the only instance of the kind," she said, "that she had known in her long life." Kitty had at first accepted, but afterwards rejected him, on-Lady Corke, and indeed all Kitty's contemporaries thought—prudential reasons.-CROKER: Preface to Lord Hervey's Mcmoirs, p. xxx.

5 This account is still erroneous. James Hammond, author of the ' Elegies,' was the second son of Anthony Hammond, of Somersham Place, in the county of Huntingdon, Esq., to whom, in 1694, Southerne dedicated his Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery.' ('Gent.'s Mag.' for 1787, p. 780, and Brydges's 'Autobiography,' vol. ii. p. 11.) The poet's grand-uncle was William Hammond, Esq., of St. Alban's Court, in Nonington, Kent, author of a volume of poems, published 1655, and reprinted in 1816 by Sir Egerton Brydges. • Frederick Prince of Wales, father of George III.