ed without abatement; for, when Addison died, he left him
the charge of publishing his works, with a solemn recommendation to the
patronage of Craggs.

To these works he prefixed an elegy on the author, which could owe none
of its beauties to the assistance, which might be suspected to have
strengthened or embellished his earlier compositions; but neither he nor
Addison ever produced nobler lines than are contained in the third and
fourth paragraphs; nor is a more sublime or more elegant funeral-poem to
be found in the whole compass of English literature.

He was afterwards, about 1725, made secretary to the lords justices of
Ireland, a place of great honour; in which he continued till 1740, when
he died on the twenty-third of April, at Bath.

Of the poems yet unmentioned, the longest is Kensington Gardens, of
which the versification is smooth and elegant, but the fiction
unskilfully compounded of Grecian deities and Gothick 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 domestick relations without censure.

HAMMOND.

Of Mr. Hammond, though he be well remembered as a man esteemed and
caressed by the elegant and 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 scholastick 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.
The manuscript of Shiels is now in my possession.

I have since found that Mr. Shiels, though he was no negligent inquirer,
has 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,