The next laureate, Thomas Warton, the historian of English poetry, is too well known and appreciated to require any lengthened notice here. In 1747 and 1748 he held the appointment of _laureated_ poet, to which he was inaugurated, according to the ancient custom, in the common-room of Trinity College, Oxford. His duty was to celebrate a lady chosen as lady patroness, and Warton performed his task crowned with a wreath of laurel. In 1757, he was elected professor of poetry, as his father had formerly been in the same university. On the demise of Whitehead in 1785, the laureateship was conferred on him by command of George the Third. He was quizzed as his predecessor had been, and, like him, laughed at the jesters; and he gradually turned their scoffs to approbation by his equanimity and the merit of his performances. Warton had not only the wit to be diverted by probationary odes in mockery of his own, which he valued at less than they were worth, but he had temper to endure the malignant scurrility of Ritson, in reference to more important labours, with no severer remark than that he was a _black-lettered dog_. A portion of his later days was devoted to a labour of love--an edition of the juvenile poems of Milton, with copious notes. Though of sedentary college habits, and a free liver, he enjoyed vigorous health to the age of 62: he then broke down. He went to Bath with the gout, and returned, as he thought, in an improved condition. The evening of May 20, 1790, he passed cheerfully in the common-room, but, before midnight, he was stricken with paralysis, and the next day he was a corpse. Henry James Pye, who was of a family of which the founder is stated to have come to England with the Conqueror, was likewise representative, by the female line, of the patriot Hampden. In 1784, he was returned to parliament as member for Berkshire. But the expense of the contest ruined him, and he was obliged to sell his estate; and even the slender salary of a laureate was not unacceptable when it fell in his way. Besides his official odes, he produced numerous works, epic, dramatic, and lyric, and also published several translations, and a corrected edition of Francis's Horace. The reader will be content if we pass all these with the remark that he was a respectable writer, a good London police-magistrate, and an honourable gentleman in a less equivocal sense than the parliamentary style. As factor of annual odes for the court, he was, of course, scurvily used by the wags. The joke on "Pindar, Pye, et parvus Pybus," was once in every body's mouth. He died in 1813, and was succeeded by