edition is as far superior to Warburton’s and Hanmer’s, which were not long after brought out with a deafening flourish of trumpets, as the editions of Steevens and Malone are to his.  Yet, prompted by the “Dunciad,” it is the fashion of literature to regard Theobald with compassion, as a block-head and empiric.  Cibber escapes but little better, and yet he was a man of respectable talent, and played no second-rate part in the literary history of the time.

As Laureate Cibber drew near the end of earthly things, a desire, common to poetical as well as political potentates, possessed him,—­a desire to nominate a successor.  In his case, indeed, the idea may have been borrowed from “MacFlecknoe” or the “Dunciad.”  The Earl of Chesterfield, during his administration in Ireland, had discovered a rival to Ben Jonson in the person of a poetical bricklayer, one Henry Jones, whom his Lordship carried with him to London, as a specimen of the indigenous tribes of Erin.  It was easier for this Jones to rhyme in heroics than to handle a trowel or construct a chimney.  He rhymed, therefore, for the amusement and in honor of the polite circle of which Stanhope was the centre; the fashionable world subscribed magnificently for his volume of “Poems upon Several Occasions";[14] his tragedy, “The Earl of Essex,” in the composition of which his patron is said to have shared, was universally applauded.  Its introduction to the stage was the work of Cibber; and Cibber, assisted by Chesterfield, labored zealously to secure the author a reversion of the laurel upon his own lamented demise.

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 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:—­