The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes, Volume 08: The Lives of the Poets, Volume IIJohnson, Samuel
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The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes, Volume 08: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II
Johnson, Samuel
Poets, English -- 18th century -- Biography; Poets, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography
it was inconceivable to him, and that there must be some mistake in the
matter; that each used to communicate to the other whatever verses they
wrote, even to the least things; that Tickell could not have been busied
in so long a work there, without his knowing something of the matter;
and that he had never heard a single word of it till on this occasion.
The surprise of Dr. Young, together with what Steele has said against
Tickell in relation to this affair, make it highly probable that there
was some underhand dealing in that business; and indeed Tickell himself,
who is a very fair worthy man, has since, in a manner, as good as owned
it to me. [When it was introduced into a conversation between Mr.
Tickell and Mr. Pope, by a third person, Tickell did not deny it; which,
considering his honour, and zeal for his departed friend, was the same
as owning it."]
Upon these suspicions, with which Dr. Warburton hints that other
circumstances concurred, Pope always, in his Art of Sinking, quotes this
book as the work of Addison.
To compare the two translations would be tedious; the palm is now given
universally to Pope; but I think the first lines of Tickell's were
rather to be preferred; and Pope seems to have since borrowed something
from them, in the correction of his own.
When the Hanover succession was disputed, Tickell gave what assistance
his pen would supply. His Letter to Avignon stands high among
party-poems; it expresses contempt without coarseness, and superiority
without insolence. It had the success which it deserved, being five
times printed.
He was now intimately united to Mr. Addison, who, when he went into
Ireland as secretary to the lord Sunderland, took him thither, and
employed him in publick business; and when, 1717, afterwards he rose to
be secretary of state, made him under-secretary. Their friendship seems
to have continued without abatement; for, when Addison died, he left him
the charge of publishing his works, with a solemn recommendation to the
patronage of Craggs.
To these works he prefixed an elegy on the author, which could owe none
of its beauties to the assistance, which might be suspected to have
strengthened or embellished his earlier compositions; but neither he nor
Addison ever produced nobler lines than are contained in the third and
fourth paragraphs; nor is a more sublime or more elegant funeral-poem to
be found in the whole compass of English literature.
He was afterwards, about 1725, made secretary to the lords justices of
Ireland, a place of great honour; in which he continued till 1740, when
he died on the twenty-third of April, at Bath.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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