THE LIFE OF HAMMOND. BY DR. JOHNSON. OF Mr. HAMMOND, though he be well remembered as a man esteemed and caressed by the elegant and the great, I was at first able to obtain no other memorials than such as are supplied by a book called Cibber's Lives of the Poets; of which I take this opportunity to testify, that it was not written, nor, I believe, ever seen, by either of the Cibbers; but was the work of Robert Shiels, a native of Scotland, a man of very acute understanding, though with little scholastic education, who, not long after the publication of his work, died in London of a consumption. His life was virtuous, and his end was pious. Theophilus Cibber, then a prisoner for debt, imparted, as I was told, his name for ten guineas. The manuscript of Shiels is now in my possession. I have since found, that Mr. Shiels, though he was no negligent inquirer, had been misled by false accounts; for he relates, that James Hammond, the author of the Elegies, was the son of a Turkey merchant, and had some office at the prince of Wales's court, till love of a lady, whose name was Dashwood, for a time disordered his understanding. He was unextinguishably amorous, and his mistress inexorably cruel. Of this narrative, part is true, and part false. He was the second son of Anthony Hammond, a man of note among the wits, poets, and parliamentary orators, in the beginning of this century, who was allied to Sir Robert Walpole by marrying his sister 1. He was born about 1710, and educated at Westminster-school; but it does not appear that he was of any university 2. He was equerry to the prince of Wales, and seems to have come very early into public notice, and to have been distinguished by those whose friendship prejudiced mankind at that time in favour of the man on whom they were bestowed; for he was the companion of Cobham, Lyttelton, and Chesterfield, He is said to have divided his life between pleasure and books; in his retirement forgetting the town, and in his gaiety losing the student. Of his literary hours all the effects are here exhibited, of which the Elegies were written very early, and the Prologue not long before his death. In 1741, he was chosen into parliament for Truro in Cornwall, probably one of those who were elected by the prince's influence; and died next year in June at Stowe, the famous seat of lord Cobham. His mistress long outlived him, and in 1779 died unmarried. The character which her lover bequeathed her was, indeed, not likely to attract courtship. 1 This account is still erroneous. James Hammond, our author, was of a different family, the second son of Anthony Hammond, of Somersham-place, in the county of Huntingdon, Esq. See Gent. Mag. vol. LVII. p. 780. R. 2 Mr. Cole gives him to Cambridge. MSS. Athenæ Cantab, in Mus. Brit. C. The Elegies were published after his death; and while the writer's name was remembred with fondness, they were read with a resolution to admire them. The recommendatory preface of the editor, who was then believed, and is now affirmed by Dr. Maty, to be the earl of Chesterfield, raised strong prejudices in their favour. But of the prefacer, whoever he was, it may be reasonably suspected that he never read the poems; for he professes to value them for a very high species of excellence, and recommends them as the genuine effusions of the mind, which expresses a real passion in the language of nature. But the truth is, these elegies have neither passion, nature, nor manners. Where there is fiction, there is no passion: he that describes himself as a shepherd, and his Neæra or Delia as a shepherdess, and talks of goats and lambs, feels no passion. He that courts his mistress with Roman imagery deserves to lose her; for she may with good reason suspect his sincerity. Hammond has few sentiments drawn from nature, and few images from modern life. He produces nothing but frigid pedantry. It would be hard to find in all his productions three stanzas that deserve to be remembered. Like other lovers, he threatens the lady with dying; and what then shall follow? Wilt thou in tears thy lover's corse attend, With plaintive cries to lead the mournful band; And cull my ashes with thy trembling hand; Panchaia's odours be their costly feast, And all the pride of Asia's fragrant year, And, what is still more precious, give thy tear. Surely no blame can fall upon a nymph who rejected a swain of so little meaning. His verses are not rugged, but they have no sweetness; they never glide in a stream of melody. Why Hammond or other writers have thought the quatrain of ten syllables elegiac, it is difficult to tell. The character of the elegy is gentleness and tenuity; but this stanza has been pronounced by Dryden, whose knowledge of English metre was not inconsiderable, to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our language affords. PREFACE. BY LORD CHESTERFIELD. THE following Elegies were wrote by a young gentleman lately dead, and justly lamented. As he had never declared his intentions concerning their publication, a friend of his, into whose hands they fell, determined to publish them, in the persuasion, that they would neither be unwelcome to the public, nor injurious to the memory of their author. The reader must decide, whether this determination was the result of just judgement, or partial friendship; for the editor feels, and avows so much of the latter, that he gives up all pretensions to the former. The Author composed them ten years ago; before he was two and twenty years old; an age when fancy and imagination commonly riot, at the expence of judgement and correctness, neither of which seem wanting here. But sincere in his love as in his friendship, he wrote to his mistresses, as he spoke to his friends, nothing but the true genuine sentiments of his heart; he sate down to write what he thought, not to think what he should write; it was nature and sentiment only that dictated to a real mistress, not youthful and poetic fancy, to an imaginary one. Elegy therefore speaks here her own, proper, native language, the unaffected plaintive language of the tender passions; the true elegiac dignity and simplicity are preserved, and united, the one without pride, the other without meanness. Tibullus seems to have been the model our author judiciously preferred to Ovid; the former writing directly from the heart, to the heart; the latter too often yielding and addressing himself to the imagination. The undissipated youth of the author, allowed him time to apply himself to the best masters, the ancients, and his parts enabled him to make the best use of them; for upon those great models of solid sense and virtue, he formed not only his genius, but his heart, both well prepared by nature to adopt, and adorn the resemblance. He admired that justness, that noble simplicity of thought and expression, which have distinguished, and preserved their writings to this day; but he revered that love of their country, that contempt of riches, that sacredness of friendship, and all those heroic and social virtues, which marked them out as the objects of the veneration, though not the imitation, of succeeding ages; and he looked back with a kind of religious awe and delight, upon those glorious and happy times of Greece and Rome, when wisdom, virtue, and liberty formed the only triumvirates, ere luxury invited corruption to taint,, or corruption introduced slavery to destroy, all public and private virtues. In these sentiments he lived, and would have lived, even in these times; in these sentiments he died--but in these times too-Ut non erepta a diis immortalibus vita, sed donata mors esse videatur. |