Some writers be of an amphibious race, And prose and verse their elemental place. Such he, whose wit made wond’ring senates roar, And those to blush that never blush’d before. _Anticipation_ gave him sterling fame, _The Wreath of Fashion_ a poetic name. And Nature gave, and at the gift repines, At pension’d wit and prostituted lines. Be your’s, O _Tickell_, to correct this vice, That deals out praise or censure at a price, And in one grand example prove to men, How weak is Wit, when Party holds the pen; And while you glow with more than virtue’s flame, And all admire from whence such virtue came, Each literary Swiss shall dread thy rage, Dismiss their weapons, and no more engage.[34] But man cannot live by wit alone. In the next two years Tickell wrote two more satirical tracts for the ministry, which, though not dull, were scarcely inspired; and in August 1781 he was appointed a commissioner of the Stamp Office. Here, with other beneficiaries of ministerial generosity and a salary of 500_l._, he stayed. A year earlier (25 July 1780) he had married Miss Mary Linley, a charming and witty young lady if less renowned than her sister Elizabeth (Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan). In September 1782, doubtless through the good offices of Lord North, they settled in an apartment in the Gold Staff Gallery at the top of Hampton Court Palace.[35] Tickell’s talents were useful in the Linley-Sheridan family enterprise of Drury Lane Theatre. He served in the capacity of Mr. Puff as “a Practitioner of Panegyric” in the newspapers, refurbished old plays, and tried his hand, with mild success, at composing librettos. When Fox and North formed their coalition government (of unhappy memory), Tickell’s political allegiance was transferred to the Whigs. That he had long had a preference for Whig society appears from the satirical-affectionate picture of Brooks’s Club in his _Epistle from the Honourable Charles Fox, Partridge-Shooting, to the Honourable John Townshend, Cruising_, 1779. The devoted but sharp-tongued Mrs. Tickell informed her sister in a letter of 1785: “So I find the election has taken a happy turn at last and I am to congratulate myself with being the wife of a member of Brooks’s.... T. is delighted; the great point of his ambition is gained.”[36] To which she added, at the thought of her husband’s increased opportunities for conviviality: “Farewell, a long farewell to all my comforts.”[37] From the many fragments of Mary Tickell’s spritely letters that have been printed here and there, it is impossible not to give at least one representative passage showing both husband and wife in character. In an undated letter from Hampton Court she wrote: