About the year 1703 Mr. Pomfret came up to London, for institution and induction, into a very considerable living, but was retarded for some time by a disgust taken by dr. Henry Compton, then bishop of London, at these four lines, in the close of his poem entitled The Choice. And as I near approach'd the verge of life, Some kind relation (for I'd have no wife) Should take upon him all my worldly care, While I did for a better state prepare. The parenthesis in these verses was so maliciously represented to the bishop, that his lordship was given to understand, it could bear no other construction than that Mr. Pomfret preferred a mistress before a wife; though the words may as well admit of another meaning, and import no more, than the preference of a single life to marriage; unless the gentlemen in orders will assert, that an unmarried Clergyman cannot live without a mistress. But the bishop was soon convinced that this aspersion against him, was no more than an effort of malice, as Mr. Pomfret at that time was really married. The opposition which his enemies made to him, had, in some measure, its effect; for by the obstructions he met with, he was obliged to stay longer in London than he intended, and as the Small-pox then raged in the metropolis, he sickened them, and died in London in the 36th year of his age. The above-mentioned friend of Mr. Pomfret, has likewise shewn the ungenerous treatment he met with in regard to his poetical compositions, in a book entitled Poems by the Earl of Roscommon, and Mr. Duke, printed 1717, in the preface to which, the publisher has peremptorily inserted the following paragraph. 'In this collection says he, of my lord Roscommon's poems, care has been taken to insert all I possibly could procure, that are truly genuine, there having been several things published under his name, which were written by others, the authors of which I could set down if it were material. Now, says the gentleman, this arrogant editor would have been more just, both to the public, and to the earl of Roscommon's memory, in telling us what things had been published under his lordship's name by others, than by concealing the authors of any such gross impositions. Instead of which, he is so much a stranger to impartiality, that he has been guilty of the very crime he exclaims against; for he has not only attributed the prospect of death to the earl of Roscommon, which was wrote by Mr. Pomfret, after the decease of that lord; but likewise another piece entitled the Prayer of Jeremy Paraphrased, prophetically representing the passionate grief of the Jewish people, for the loss of their town, and sanctuary, written by Mr. Southcot, a gentleman who published it in the year 1717, so that it is to be hoped, in a future edition of the earl of Roscommon's, and Mr. Duke's poems, the same care will be taken to do these gentlemen justice, as to prevent any other person from hereafter injuring the memory of his lordship.'