unfortunate. He supported an only brother in his house, with a family as numerous as his own, and ruined himself by his generosity. At last, the loss of his wife, after a union of fifty years, the death of many of his children, and his other misfortunes, overwhelmed his intellects. Of this imbecility there were, indeed, some manifestations in the latest productions of his pen.

JOHN SCOTT.

[Born, 1730. Died, 1783.]

THIS worthy and poetical Quaker was the son of a draper in London, and was born in the borough of Southwark. His father retired to Amwell, in Hertfordshire, when our poet was only ten years old; and this removal, together with the circumstance of his never having been inoculated for the small-pox, proved an unfortunate impediment to his education. He was put to a dayschool in the neighbouring town of Ware, where not much instruction was to be had; and from that little he was called away upon the first alarm of infection. Such, indeed, was his constant apprehension of the disease, that he lived for twenty years within twenty miles of London, without visiting it more than once. About the age of seventeen, however, he betook himself to reading. His family, from their cast of opinions and society, were not likely to abound either in books or conversation relating to literature; but he happened to form an acquaintance and friendship with a neighbour of the name of Frogley, a master bricklayer, who, though an uneducated man, was an admirer of poetry, and by his intercourse with this friend he strengthened his literary propensity. His first poetical essays were transmitted to "The Gentleman's Magazine.' In his thirtieth year he published four elegies, which were favourably received. His poems entitled 'The Garden' and' Amwell,' and his volume of collected poetical pieces, appeared after considerable intervals; and his 'Critical Essays on the English Poets' two years after his death. These, with his Remarks on the Poems of Rowley,' are all that can be called his literary productions. He published also two political tracts, in answer to Dr. Johnson's 'Patriot' and 'False Alarm.' His critical essays contain some judicious remarks on Denham and Dyer; but his verbal strictures on Collins and Goldsmith

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discover a miserable insensibility to the soul of those poets. His own verses are chiefly interesting where they breathe the pacific principles of the Quaker; while his personal character engages respect, from exhibiting a public spirit and liberal taste beyond the habits of his brethren. He was well informed in the laws of his country; and, though prevented by his tenets from becoming a magistrate, he made himself useful to the inhabitants of Amwell by his offices of arbitration, and by promoting schemes of local improvement. He was constant in his attendance at turnpike meetings, navigation trusts, and commissions of land-tax. Ware and Hertford were indebted to him for the plan of opening a spacious road between those two towns. His treatises on the highway and parochial laws were the result of long and laudable attention to those subjects.

His verses, and his amiable character, gained him by degrees a large circle of literary acquaintance, which included Dr. Johnson, Sir William Jones, Mrs. Montague, and many other distinguished individuals; and having submitted to inoculation in his thirty-sixth year, he was from that period more frequently in London. In his retirement he was fond of gardening; and, in amusing himself with the improvement of his grounds, had excavated a grotto in the side of a hill, which his biographer, Mr. Hoole, writing in 1785, says, was still shown as a curiosity in that part of the country. He was twice married. His first wife was the daughter of his friend Frogley. He died at a house in Radcliff, of a putrid fever, and was interred there in the burying ground of the Friends.

GEORGE ALEXANDER STEVENS.

[Born, 17-. Died, 1784.]

IF Fletcher of Saltoun's maxim be true, "that the popular songs of a country are of more importance than its laws," Stevens must be regarded as an important criminal in literature. But the songs of a country rather record than influence the state of popular morality. Stevens celebrated hard drinking, because it was the fashion; and his songs are now seldom vociferated, because that fashion is gone by. George was a leading member of all the great bacchanalian clubs of his day-the Choice Spirits, Comus' Court, and others of similar importance and utility.

Before the scheme of his lecture brought him a fortune, he had frequently to do penance in jail for the debts of the tavern; and, on one of those occasions, wrote a poem entitled 'Religion,' expressing a penitence for his past life; which was probably sincere while his confinement lasted. He was also author of 'Tom Fool,' a novel; "The Birthday of Folly,' a satire; and several dramatic pieces of slender consequence.

WILLIAM WHITEHEAD.

[Born, 1715. Died, 1785.]

"It would be

WILLIAM WHITEHEAD was born in Cambridge. vain," says his biographer, Mason, the poet, "to conceal that he was of low extraction; because the secret has been more than once divulged by those who gain what they think an honest livelihood by publishing the lives of the living; and it would be injurious to his memory, because his having risen much above the level of his origin bespeaks an intrinsic merit, which mere ancestry can never confer. Let it then be rather boasted than whispered that he was the son of a baker." This is really making too much of a small thing. Every day certainly witnesses more wonderful events than the son of a tradesman rising to the honours of a poet laureate and the post of a travelling tutor. Why Mason should speak of the secret of his extraction being divulged is difficult to conceive, unless we suppose that Whitehead was weak enough to have wished to conceal it; a suspicion, however, which it is not fair to indulge, when we look to the general respectability of his personal character, and to the honest pride which he evinced in voluntarily discharging his father's debts. But, with all respect for Whitehead, be it observed that the annals of "baking" can boast of much more illustrious individuals having sprung from the loins of its professors. His father, however, was a man of taste and expenditure much above the pitch of a baker. He spent most of his time in ornamenting a piece of ground, near Grantchester, which still goes by the name of Whitehead's Folly; and he left debts behind him at his death that would have done honour to the prodigality of a poet. In consequence of his father dying in such circumstances, young Whitehead's education was accomplished with great difficulty, by the strictest economy on his own part, and

the assistance of his mother, whose discharge of duty to him he has gratefully recorded. At the age of fourteen he was put to Winchester School, upon the foundation. He was there distinguished by his love of reading, and by his facility in the production of English verse; and before he was sixteen he had written an entire comedy. When the Earl of Peterborough, accompanied by Pope, visited Winchester School, in the year 1733, he gave ten guineas to be distributed in prizes among the boys. Pope prescribed the subject, which was "Peterborough," and young Whitehead was one of the six who shared the prizemoney. It would appear that Pope had distinguished him on this occasion, as the reputation of his. notice was afterwards of advantage to Whitehead when he went to the university. He also gained some applause at Winchester for his powers of acting, in the part of Marcia, in 'Cato.' He was a graceful reciter, and is said to have been very handsome in his youth. Even his likeness, which is given in Mason's edition of his works, though it was taken when he was advanced in years, has an elegant and prepossessing countenance. It was observed that his school friendships were usually contracted with youths superior to himself in station. Without knowing his individual associates, it is impossible to say whether vanity, worldly prudence, or a taste for refined manners, predominated in this choice; but it is observable that he made his way to prosperity by such friendships, and he seems to have early felt that he had the power of acquiring them. At Winchester he was school-tutor to Mr. Wallop, afterwards Lord Lymington, son to the Earl of Portsmouth.

At the election to New College in 1735 he was treated with some injustice, being placed too low in the roll of candidates; and was obliged to leave Winchester without obtaining from thence a presentation to either university. He, however, obtained a scholarship at Clare Hall, Cambridge, from the very circumstance of that low extraction for which Mason apologises. Being the orphan son of a baker in Cambridge, he was thought the best entitled to be put on the foundation of Pyke, who had been of that trade and town. His scholarship was worth only four shillings a-week, and he was admitted as a sizer; but the inferiority of his station did not prevent his introduction to the best society; and, before he left the university, he made himself known by several publications, particularly by his 'Essay on the

Danger of writing Verse.' Having obtained a fellowship and a master's degree, he was on the point of taking orders, when his intention was prevented, in consequence of his being invited by the Earl of Jersey to be the domestic tutor of his son, Viscount Villiers. This situation was made peculiarly agreeable to him by the kindness of the Jersey family, and by the abundant leisure which it afforded him to pursue his studies, as well as to enjoy public amusements. From frequenting the theatre, he was led to attempt dramatic composition. His first effort was a little farce on the subject of the Pretender, which has never been published. In 1750 he brought upon the stage a regular tragedy, 'The Roman Father,' an imitation of Corneille's 'Horace.' Mason has employed a good deal of criticism on this drama to prove something analogous to the connoisseur's remark in Goldsmith, "that the piece would have been better if the artist had bestowed more pains upon it." It is acknowledged, at the same time, by his biographer, that 'The Roman Father' was long enough in its author's hands to receive many alterations; but these had not been for the better. It was put through the mangle of Garrick's criticism; and he, according to Mason, was a lover of no beauties in a play but those which gave an opportunity for the display of his own powers of representing sudden and strong effects of passion. This remark of Mason accords with Johnson's complaint of Garrick's projected innovations in his own tragedy : "That fellow," he said, "wants me to make Mahomet mad, that he may have an opportunity of tossing his hands and kicking his heels." For the faults of the piece, however, it is but circuitous and conjectural justice to make Garrick responsible; and, among those faults, the mode of the heroine's death is not the slightest. After Corneille's heroine has been stabbed by her brother, she appears no more upon the stage. The piece, to be sure, drags heavily after this event; for, in fact, its interest is concluded. Whitehead endeavours to conquer this difficulty by keeping her alive, after she has been wounded, in order to have a conference with her father, which she terminates by tearing the bandages off her wounds, and then expires. But the effect of her death by this process is more disagreeable than even the tedium of Corneille's fifth act. It inspires us with a sore physical shuddering, instead of tragic commiseration.*

* The directions for tearing off the bandages are given in Mason's edition