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304 some time, and resided with them for fourteen years; but at the death of Lord Jersey, much against his pupil's wish, he went into private lodgings, but continued to spend his summers between Middleton and Nuneham. Horace Walpole, in a letter dated at the latter place August 3rd, 1775, writes, in giving an account of a stay he had been making there: "There was Mr. Whitehead the Laureat, too, who, I doubt, will be a little puzzled if he has no better a victory than the last against Cæsar's next birthday. There was a little too much of the Vertere funeribus triumphos for a complimentary ode in the last action."

Cibber died in 1757. The Laureateship was offered to Gray, but Pope, Swift, and the other wits had succeeded in making the office so ridiculous by their attacks on Cibber, that Gray, though fearful of giving offence to those by whom it was offered to him, shrunk from it almost with disgust. Mason, it is said, was passed by because in orders, but Eusden before and Warton afterwards were both clergymen. Through the advocacy of the Jerseys, Whitehead next received an offer of the rejected Laurel. It had been offered to Gray as a sinecure. The annual odes were to be dispensed with. Not so with Whitehead; and this has excited the surprise of Mason, who says, "the late King would readily have dispensed with hearing music for which he had no ear, and Poetry for which he had no taste." On this, Campbell remarks: "His wonder is quite misplaced. If the King had a taste for Poetry, he would have abolished the Laureate Odes. As he had not, they were continued."

This is a rather obvious sarcasm, but the remark is true enough. Literature would have lost but little that is good had Whitehead's forty-eight odes never been added to the stock of unreadable verse. "I remember,