Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 55.djvu/386

 hundred lines which are acknowledged to be his. He instances the character of Corah and perhaps Arod, and the account of the Green-ribbon Club. The portraits of Michal and of Dryden as Asaph he concedes wholly to Tate. In Dryden's ‘Miscellanies’ and his translations of Ovid and Juvenal, Tate appears as an occasional colleague for the next few years.

On the death of Shadwell, Tate was appointed poet laureate (24 Dec. 1692) through Dorset, the lord chamberlain. Southey has pronounced him the lowest of the laureates except his predecessor; but Pye and Eusden may dispute the place. He celebrated in official verse the death of Queen Mary and Queen Anne and the victory of Blenheim, as well as many smaller events. He was reappointed by the lord chamberlain upon Anne's accession in 1702, and was also named historiographer-royal, with a pension of 200l. a year. He seems to have lost his post on the accession of George I, his successor, Nicholas Rowe, being appointed on 1 Aug. 1715.

In 1696 appeared the ‘New Version of the Psalms,’ in metre, by N. Tate and Nicholas Brady [see ]. Two different recensions of it were published in 1698, and from each of these a stream of editions issued for a century. The book was ‘allowed’ and ‘permitted to be used in all churches, &c., as shall think fit to receive it’ by the king in council. In 1698 ‘A Supplement to the New Version of the Psalms’ by the same authors was advertised, containing paraphrases of the Lord's Prayer, Creed, Commandments, Canticles, &c., after the precedent of Sternhold and Hopkins, and several additional psalms in peculiar measures. A license for this book was obtained from the queen in council in 1703. The additional psalms were omitted and other changes were made in later editions. Tate's share in these volumes cannot be apportioned; but it is plausible to ascribe to him the ornate pieces of a Drydenesque character (of these Ps. cxxxvii, ‘Thou, Lord, by strictest search hast known,’ is the best). The Christmas hymn, ‘While shepherds watched,’ is generally attributed to him, and a few of similar feeling (e.g. Ps. xlii. ‘As pants the hart’), which stand out above the doggerel mass, may be his also. There are curious traces of political allusion in Psalms xviii. xxxvii–xliii. ci–ii–lxx. and cvii–xl.— The prince who slights what God commands, Exposed to scorn must leave his throne. Though attaining ultimately almost universal use, the book made way in the churches at first slowly. Bishop Beveridge condemned it as ‘new and modish.’ Tate replied to his attack with some spirit in an ‘Essay on Psalmody’ (1710).

Almost all Tate's work is tacked on to that of some one else, either as an editor or a translator, or a colleague or one of a company. The list of the productions in which he had a hand is long. Among the translations which he executed for the booksellers may be mentioned, from the French, ‘The Life of Louis of Bourbon, late Prince of Condé, digested into Annals’ (1693); ‘The Four Epistles of A. G. Busbequius concerning his Embassy into Turkey’ (1694); and from the Latin Cowley's ‘History of Plants’ (1695). The only original poem worth naming is ‘Panacea—a poem on Tea’ (London, 1700, 8vo). Most of his poems are elegies or adulatory verses to great people, designed to attract pecuniary recognition. Pope's label for him in the ‘Dunciad’ is ‘Tate's poor page;’ elsewhere he calls him the poetical child of Ogilby. Parnell ridicules him in the ‘Bookworm.’

Tate is described as an honest, quiet man, with a downcast face and somewhat given to ‘fuddling.’ The patronage of Dorset often shielded him from his creditors. But he was hiding from them in the Mint, Southwark, when death found him, 12 Aug. 1715. He was buried in the neighbouring church of St. George's.

[Jacob's Poetical Register; Biogr. Dramatica; Beljame's Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au XVIIIme Siècle, 1883, pp. 153, 494; Chalmers's Biogr. Dict.; Austin and Ralph's Lives of the Poets Laureate, 1853, pp. 196–222; Hamilton's Origin of the Office of Poet Laureate, 1879; Dryden's Works, by Sir Walter Scott, re-edited by Professor Saintsbury; Julian's Dict. of Hymnology.] 

TATE, THOMAS (1807–1888), mathematician, born at Alnwick on 28 Feb. 1807, was son of Ralph Tate, a builder. His mother's maiden name was Turner, and his full name was Thomas Turner Tate. George Tate (1805–1871) [q. v.] was his brother. It was intended that he should take up the business of his father, and as a qualification he studied under an architect in Edinburgh; but on his father's death he turned to more congenial pursuits, and in 1835 obtained the appointment of lecturer on chemistry to the York medical school. In 1840 he became master of the mathematical and scientific department of Battersea training college, and in 1849 obtained a like post in Kneller training college. When this college was broken up in 1856 a pension was assigned him. He was elected fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society on 14 March 1851. He