“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 assailant was Charles Churchill.  He never spares him,—­

    “Who in the Laureate chair—­
  By grace, not merit, planted there—­
  In awkward pomp is seen to sit,
  And by his patent proves his wit;
  For favors of the great, we know,
  Can wit as well as rank bestow;
  And they who, without one pretension,
  Can get for fools a place or pension,
  Must able be supposed, of course,
  If reason is allowed due force,
  To give such qualities and grace
  As may equip them for the place.

    “But he who measures as he goes
  A mongrel kind of tinkling prose,
  And is too frugal to dispense
  At once both poetry and sense,—­
  Who, from amidst his slumbering guards,
  Deals out a charge to subject bards,
  Where couplets after couplets creep,
  Propitious to the reign of sleep,” etc.

Again, in the “Prophecy of Famine,”—­

  “A form, by silken smile, and tone
  Dull and unvaried, for the Laureate known,
  Folly’s chief friend, Decorum’s eldest son,
  In every party found, and yet of none,
  This airy substance, this substantial shade.”

And elsewhere he begs for

“Some such draught... 
As makes a Whitehead’s ode go down,
Or slakes the feverette of Brown.”

But satire disturbed not the calm equanimity of the pensioner and placeman.

         “The laurel worn
  By poets in old time, but destined now
  In grief to wither on a Whitehead’s brow,”

continued to fade there, until a whole generation of poets had passed away.  It was not until the middle of April, 1785, that Death made way for a successor.