after his death were published by the Earl of Chesterfield, was the son
of a Turkey merchant, in the city of London. We cannot ascertain where
he received his education; but it does not appear that he was at any of
the universities. Mr. Hammond was early preferred to a place about the
person of the late Prince of Wales, which he held till an unfortunate
accident stript him of his reason, or at least so affected his
imagination, that his senses were greatly disordered. The unhappy cause
of his calamity was a passion he entertained for one Miss Dashwood,
which proved unsuccessful. Upon this occasion it was that he wrote his
Love Elegies, which have been much celebrated for their tenderness. The
lady either could not return his passion with a reciprocal fondness, or
entertained too ambitious views to settle her affections upon him, which
he himself in some of his Elegies seems to hint; for he frequently
mentions her passion for gold and splendour, and justly treats it as
very unworthy a fair one's bosom. The chief beauty of these Elegies
certainly consists in their being written by a man who intimately felt
the subject; for they are more the language of the heart than of the
head. They have warmth, but little poetry, and Mr. Hammond seems to have
been one of those poets, who are made so by love, not by nature.

Mr. Hammond died in the year 1743, in the thirty-first year of his age,
at Stow, the seat of his kind patron, the lord Cobham, who honoured him
with a particular intimacy. The editor of Mr. Hammond's Elegies
observes, that he composed them before he was 21 years of age; a period,
says he, when fancy and imagination commonly riot at the expence of
judgment and correctness. He was sincere in his love, as in his
friendship; he wrote to his mistress, as he spoke to his friends,
nothing but the true genuine sentiments of his heart. Tibullus seems to
have been the model our author judiciously preferred to Ovid; the former
writing directly from the heart to the heart, the latter too often