e countenance to ev'ry great man's look:
Let those, that have a mind, turn slave to eat,
And live contented by another's plate:
I rate my freedom higher, nor will I,
For food and rayment track my liberty.
But if I must to my last shift be put,
To fill a bladder, and twelve yards of gut,
Richer with counterfeited wooden leg,
And my right arm tyed up, I'll choose to beg.
I'll rather choose to starve at large, than be,
The gaudiest vassal to dependancy.

The above is a lively and animated description of the miseries of a
slavish dependance on the great, particularly that kind of
mortification which a chaplain must undergo. It is to be lamented,
that gentlemen of an academical education should be subjected to
observe so great a distance from those, over whom in all points of
learning and genius they may have a superiority. Tho' in the very
nature of things this must necessarily happen, yet a high spirit
cannot bear it, and it is with pleasure we can produce Oldham, as one
of those poets who have spurned dependence, and acted consistent with
the dignity of his genius, and the lustre of his profession.

When the earl of Kingston found that Mr. Oldham's spirit was too high
to accept his offer of chaplainship, he then caressed him as a
companion, and gave him an invitation to his house at Holmes-Pierpont,
in Nottinghamshire. This invitation Mr. Oldham accepted, and went into
the country with him, not as a dependant but friend; he considered
himself as a poet, and a clergyman, and in consequence of that, he did
not imagine the earl was in the least degraded by making him his bosom
companion. Virgil was the friend of Maecenas, and shone in the court of
Augustus, and if it should be observed that Virgil was a greater poet
than Oldham, it may be answered, Maecenas was a greater man than the
Earl of Kingston, and the court of Augustus much more brilliant than
that of Charles II.

Our author had not been long at the seat of this Earl, before, being
seized with the small pox, he died December 9, 1683, in the 30th year
of his age, and was interred with the utmost decency, his lordship
attending as chief mourner, in the church there, where the earl soon
after erected a monument to his memory.--Mr. Oldham's works were
printed at London 1722, in two volumes 12mo. They chiefly consist of
Satires, Odes, Translations, Paraphrases of Horace, and other authors;
Elegiac Verses, Imitations, Parodies, Familiar Epistles,