y. To
him Addison left the charge of editing his works, which were published
by subscription, and appeared in four quarto volumes in 1721. In 1725 he
was made secretary to the Lord Justices of Ireland, 'a place of great
honour,' which he held until his death in 1740. The praise of
Wordsworth, a poet always chary of expressing approbation, has been
bestowed upon Tickell. 'I think him,' he said, 'one of the very best
writers of occasional verses.'

[Sidenote: William Somerville (1692-1742).]

Tickell had written some lines on hunting, which he published as a
fragment. His contemporary Somerville, selecting the same subject, wrote
_The Chase_ (1735), a poem in blank verse. He was born at Edston, in
Warwickshire, and was said, Dr. Johnson writes, 'to be of the first
family in his county.' He was educated at Winchester and Oxford, and had
the tastes of a scholar as well as of a country gentleman, which, among
other accomplishments, included that of hard drinking. We know little
about him, and what we do know is deplorable, for his friend Shenstone
writes that he was plagued and threatened by low wretches, and 'forced
to drink himself into pains of the body in order to get rid of the pains
of the mind.' He died in 1742, the owner of a good estate, which, owing
to a contempt for economy, he was never able to enjoy. 'I loved him for
nothing so much,' said Shenstone, 'as for his
flocci-nauci-nihili-pili-fication of money.'

In _The Chase_ Somerville had the advantage of knowing his subject, but
knowledge is not poetry, and the interest of the poem is not due to its
poetical qualities. He deserves some credit for his skill in handling a
variety of metres as well as blank verse, in which his principal poem is
written. In an address _To Mr. Addison_, the couplet,

'When panting Virtue her last efforts made,
You brought your Clio to the virgin's aid,'

is praised by Johnson as one of those happy strokes which are seldom
attained. In the same poem Shakespeare and Addison are brought together
in a way that is far from happy:

'In heaven he sings; on earth your muse supplies
Th' important loss, and heals our weeping eyes,
Correctly great, she melts each flinty heart
With equal genius, but superior art.'

Praise can be too strong even for a poet's digestion, and Somerville,
who writes a great deal more nonsense in the same strain, should have
remembered that he was not addressing a fool. If the poetical