long work. A pastoral of an hundred lines may be endured, but who
will hear of sheep and goats, and myrtle bowers and purling
rivulets, through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the
dawn of literature, and children in the dawn of life, but will be
for the most part thrown away as men grow wise and nations grow
learned.



TICKELL.



Thomas Tickell, the son of the Rev. Richard Tickell, was born in
1686, at Bridekirk, in Cumberland, and in 1701 became a member of
Queen's College in Oxford; in 1708 he was made Master of Arts, and
two years afterwards was chosen Fellow, for which, as he did not
comply with the statutes by taking orders, he obtained a
dispensation from the Crown. He held his fellowship till 1726, and
then vacated it by marrying, in that year, at Dublin.

Tickell was not one of those scholars who wear away their lives in
closets; he entered early into the world and was long busy in public
affairs, in which he was initiated under the patronage of Addison,
whose notice he is said to have gained by his verses in praise of
Rosamond. To those verses it would not have been just to deny
regard, for they contain some of the most elegant encomiastic
strains; and among the innumerable poems of the same kind it will be
hard to find one with which they need to fear a comparison. It may
deserve observation that when Pope wrote long afterwards in praise