d his delay by telling them how the sweat of his distress had so
disordered his wig that he could not come till he had been refitted by
a barber. He so interested himself in his own drama that, if I remember
right, as he sat in the upper gallery, he accompanied the players by
audible recitation, till a friendly hint frighted him to silence.
Pope countenanced Agamemnon by coming to it, the first night, and
was welcomed to the theatre by a general clap; he had much regard for
Thomson, and once expressed it in a poetical epistle sent to Italy, of
which, however, he abated the value by transplanting some of the lines
into his Epistle to Arbuthnot.

About this time (1737) the Act was passed for licensing plays, of which
the first operation was the prohibition of Gustavus Vasa, a tragedy of
Mr. Brooke, whom the public recompensed by a very liberal subscription;
the next was the refusal of Edward and Eleonora, offered by Thomson. It
is hard to discover why either play should have been obstructed. Thomson
likewise endeavoured to repair his loss by a subscription, of which
I cannot now tell the success. When the public murmured at the unkind
treatment of Thomson, one of the Ministerial writers remarked that "he
had taken a Liberty which was not agreeable to Britannia in any Season."
He was soon after employed, in conjunction with Mr. Mallet, to write the
masque of Alfred, which was acted before the Prince at Cliefden House.

His next work (1745) was, Tancred and Sigismunda, the most successful of
all his tragedies, for it still keeps its turn upon the stage. It may be
doubted whether he was, either by the bent of nature or habits of study,
much qualified for tragedy. It does not appear that he had much sense
of the pathetic; and his diffusive and descriptive style produced
declamation rather than dialogue. His friend Mr. Lyttelton was now in
power, and conferred upon him the office of Surveyor-General of the
Leeward Islands; from which, when his deputy was paid, he received about
three hundred pounds a year.

The last piece that he lived to publish was the "Castle of Indolence,"
which was many years under his hand, but was at last finished with great
accuracy. The first canto opens a scene of lazy luxury that fills the
imagination. He was now at ease, but was not long to enjoy it, for, by
taking cold on the water between London and Kew, he caught a disorder,
which, with some careless exasperation, ended in a fever that put an e