pending.

At the same time he recommended the cause of the enslaved Negroes from
the pulpit. The abolition of the slave trade was one of the few
political subjects, the introduction of which seemed to be allowable in
that place. In 1788, appeared also his Memoirs of William Whitehead,
attached to the posthumous works of that writer; a piece of biography,
as little to be compared in interest to the former, as Whitehead himself
can be compared to Gray.

His old age glided on in solitude and peace amid his favourite pursuits,
at his rectory of Aston, where he had taught his two acres of garden to
command the inequalities of "hill and dale," and to combine "use with
beauty." The sonnet in which he dedicated his poems to his patron, the
Earl of Holdernesse, describes in his best manner the happiness he
enjoyed in this retreat. He was not long permitted to add to his other
pleasures the comforts of a connubial life. In 1765 he had married Mary,
daughter of William Shermon, Esq., of Kingston-upon-Hull, who in two
years left him a widower. Her epitaph is one of those little poems to
which we can always return with a melancholy pleasure. I have heard that
this lady had so little regard for the art in which her husband
excelled, that on his presenting her with a copy of verses, after the
wedding was over, she crumpled them up and put them into her pocket
unread. When he had entered his seventieth year, Hurd, who had been his
first friend, and the faithful monitor of his studies from youth,
confined him "to a sonnet once a year, or so;" warning him, that "age,
like infancy, should forbear to play with pointed tools." He had more
latitude allowed in prose; for in 1795 he published Essays, Historical
and Critical, on English Church Music. In the former part of his
subject, he is said, by those who have the best means of knowing, to be
well informed and accurate; but in the latter to err on the side of a
dry simplicity, which, in the present refined state of the art, it would
not answer any good purpose to introduce into the music of our churches.
In speaking of a wind instrument, which William of Malmsbury seems to
describe as being acted on by the vapour arising from hot water, he has
unfortunately gone out of his way to ridicule the projected invention of
the steam-boat by Lord Stanhope. The atrocities committed during the
fury of the French Revolution had so entirely cured him of his
predilection for the popular part of our Gove