Government preferment, however, he did receive. The chancellor conferred on him the place of Secretary of the Briefs, which made him independent. On the death of the Chancellor Talbot he lost this post, through being too indolent to make application to Lord Hardwicke for it, though Hardwicke kept it open for some time that he might. For a time he was again reduced by this circumstance to poverty and difficulty. Out of this he was, after a while, permanently raised through the influence of Lord Lyttleton, a pension of a hundred a year being conferred on him. This removed the pressure of utter necessity, but compelled him to work, without which compulsion, perhaps, no man would have worked less. About three years before his death, Lord Lyttleton, being then in power, made him Surveyor-general of the Leeward Islands. Those islands he surveyed from his elevation on Richmond Hill, and very general his survey of course must have been. The particular and actual survey was left to his deputy in the islands themselves, and Thomson netted a yearly balance, the deputy being paid, of three hundred a year, which, with his pension, left him most comfortably at ease in the castle of indolence. Besides his two principal poems, he wrote several tragedies, as Sophonisba, in which the unfortunate line, "O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O!" was parodied by a wag with "O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O!" and was echoed through the town every where and for a long time. Agamemnon was another, Edward and Eleonora a third, and Tancred and Sigismunda his last and best, except a posthumous one--Coriolanus. Among the haunts of Thomson were the country houses of many of the more literary or more tasteful noblemen of the time, as Hagley, the seat of Lord Lyttleton; Bub Doddington's seat in Dorsetshire; Stowe, then the seat of Lord Cobham; the seat of the Countess of Hertford, &c. The last place, however, it seems, only received Thomson once. It was the practice, says Johnson, of the Countess of Hertford, to whom Thomson dedicated his poem of Spring, to invite some poet every summer into the country to hear her verses and assist her studies. This honor was once conferred on Thomson, who took more delight in carousing with Lord Hertford and his friends than assisting her ladyship's poetical operations, and never, therefore, received another summons.