Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/467



The effort was unsuccessful. Cibber's death occurred in December, 1757. The administration of the elder Pitt, which had been restored six months before, was insensible to the merits of the prodigious bricklayer. The wreath was tendered to Thomas Gray. It would, no doubt, have proved a grateful relief to royalty, obliged for twenty-seven years to listen twice yearly, if not oftener, to the monotonous felicitations of Colley, to hear in his stead the author of the "Bard," of the "Progress of Poetry," of the "Ode at Eton College." But the relief was denied it. Gray, ambitious only of the historical chair at Cambridge, declined the laurel. In the mean time, the claims of William Whitehead were earnestly advocated with the Lord Chamberlain, by Lord and Lady Jersey, and by the Earl Harcourt. A large vote in the House of Commons might be affected by a refusal. Pitt, who cared nothing for the laurel, but much for the votes, gave his assent, and Whitehead was appointed. Whitehead was the son of a baker, and, as an eleëmosynary scholar at Winchester School, had won a poetical prize offered to the students by Alexander Pope. Obtaining a free scholarship at Cambridge, he became in due time a fellow of Clare Hall, and subsequently tutor to the sons of Lord Jersey and Lord Harcourt, with whom he made the tour of the Continent. Two of his tragedies, "The Roman Father," and "Creüsa," met with more success than they deserved. A volume of poems, not without merit, was given to the press in 1756, and met with unusual favor through the exertions of his two noble friends. That he was not a personal applicant for the laurel, nor conscious of the movement in his behalf, he takes occasion in one of his poems to state:-- "Howe'er unworthily I wear the crown, unasked it came, and from a hand unknown."[15]

From the warm championship of his friends, and the commendations of Mason, the friend of Gray, we infer that Whitehead was not destitute of fine social qualities. His verse, which is of the only type current a century ago, is elegantly smooth, and wearisomely tame,--nowhere rising into striking or original beauties. Among his merits as a poet modesty was not. His "Charge to the Poets," published in 1762, drew upon him the wrath and ridicule of his fellow-verse-wrights, and perhaps deservedly. Assuming, with amusing vanity, what, if ever true, was only so a century before or a half-century after, that the laurel was the emblem of supremacy in the realm of letters, and that it had been granted him as a token of his matchless merit,-- "Since my king and patron have thought fit To place me on the throne of modern wit,--" he proceeds to read the subject throng a saucy lecture on their vices and follies,--

"As bishops to their clergy give their charge."

A good-natured dogmatism is the tone of the whole; but presumption and dogmatism find no charity among the _genus irritabile_, and Whitehead received no quarter. Small wits and great levelled their strokes at a hide which self-conceit had happily rendered proof. The sturdiest assailant was Charles Churchill. He never spares him,-- "Who in the Laureate chair-- By grace, not merit, planted there--  In awkward pomp is seen to sit,  And by his patent proves his wit;  For favors of the great, we know,  Can wit as well as rank bestow;  And they who, without one pretension,  Can get for fools a place or pension,  Must able be supposed, of course,  If reason is allowed due force,  To give such qualities and grace  As may equip them for the place.

"But he who measures as he goes A mongrel kind of tinkling prose,  And is too frugal to dispense  At once both poetry and sense,--  Who, from amidst his slumbering guards,  Deals out a charge to subject bards,  Where couplets after couplets creep,  Propitious to the reign of sleep," etc.

Again, in the "Prophecy of Famine,"-- "A form, by silken smile, and tone Dull and unvaried, for the Laureate known,