he edition of his poetical works by Dr. Mant, he has shewn that the
public duties required at the first foundation of the Professorship,
owing to the improvement in the course of academical studies, are
rendered no longer necessary. From one who had already voluntarily done
so much, it would have been ungracious to exact the performance of
public labours not indispensably requisite. In the discharge of his
function as Laureate, he still continued, as he had long ago professed
himself to be,--

Too free in servile courtly phrase to fawn;

and had the wish been gratified,--expressed by himself before his
appointment, or by Gibbon after it,--that the annual tribute might be
dispensed with, we should have lost some of his best lyric effusions.

Till his sixty-second year, he had experienced no interruption to a
vigorous state of health. Then a seizure of the gout compelled him to
seek relief from the use of the Bath waters; and he returned from that
place to college, with the hope of a recovery from his complaint. But on
the 20th of May, 1790, between ten and eleven o'clock at night, as he
was sitting in the common room with two of the college fellows, and in
higher spirits than usual, a paralytic affection deprived him of his
speech. Some indistinct sounds only, in which it was thought the name of
his friend, Mr. Price, the librarian of the Bodleian, was heard, escaped
him, and he expired on the day but one after. His funeral was honoured
by the attendance of the Vice-Chancellor, and a numerous train of
followers, to the ante-chapel of his college, where he is interred, with
a very plain inscription to his memory.

His person was short and thick, though in the earlier part of his life
he had been thought handsome. His face, latterly, became somewhat
rubicund, and his utterance so confused, that Johnson compared it to the
gobbling of a turkey. The portrait of him by Reynolds, besides the
resemblance of the features, is particularly characterized by the manner
in which the hand is drawn, so as to give it a great air of truth. He
was negligent in his dress; and so little studious of appearances, that
having despatched his labours, while others were yet in bed, he might
have been found, at the usual hours of study, loitering on the banks of
his beloved Cherwell, or in the streets, following the drum and fife, a
sound which was known to have irresistible attraction for his ears,--a
spectator at a military parade, or even o