mbridge, 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 eleemosynary 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 "Creuesa," 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
as