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Pope adds in a note:-'An author whose eminence in the infantine style obtained him this name.' In later editions the line runs :

'Lo! Ambrose Philips is,' &c.

In a suppressed couplet in Prol. Sat. Pope described him as— 'Nurse Namby with a song to sucking child,

The stiff Anacreon and the Pindar mild.'

Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), iii. 255.

In The Art of Sinking, ch. xi, he quotes him as an example of 'The Infantine.' Ib. x. 383. Speaking of Gay's Fables he wrote:- Mr. Philips will take it ill to be taught that one may write things to a child without being childish.' lb. vii. 67.

Swift, in his Bettesworth's Exultation, asks:

'And who by the Drapier would not rather damn'd be

Than demigoddized by madrigal Namby.' Works, xii. 419. He parodied Philips's verses in Helter Skelter and On Rover, a Lady's Spaniel. Ib. xiv. 202, 347. See also Addison's Works, vi. 696, for other verses attributed to Swift.

To the

Lamb, after quoting some verses by Wither, continues: measure in which these lines are written the wits of Queen Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips, who has used it in some instances, as in the lines on Cuzzoni, to my feeling at least, very deliciously.' Poems, Plays and Essays, ed. 1888, p. 300.

The following are the lines:

'Little Syren of the stage,

Charmer of an idle age,

Empty warbler, breathing lyre,
Wanton gale of fond desire,
Bane of ev'ry manly art,
Sweet enfeebler of the heart!
O, too pleasing in thy strain,
Hence to southern climes again;
Tuneful mischief, vocal spell,
To this island bid farewell;
Leave us as we ought to be,

Leave the Britons rough and free.'

Eng. Poets, Ivii. 59.

Writing of the small-pox which had attacked Miss Carteret Philips

prettily says (ib. p. 78):

'O'er her features let it pass

Like the breeze o'er springing grass.'

1

G

WEST

ILBERT WEST is one of the writers of whom I regret my inability to give a sufficient account; the intelligence which my enquiries have obtained is general and scanty'. 2 He was the son of the reverend Dr. West; perhaps him who published Pindar at Oxford about the beginning of this century2. His mother was sister to Sir Richard Temple, afterwards lord Cobham3. His father, purposing to educate him for the Church, sent him first to Eton, and afterwards to Oxford; but he was seduced to a more airy mode of life, by a commission in a troop of horse procured him by his uncle 5.

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He continued some time in the army, though it is reasonable to suppose that he never sunk into a mere soldier, nor ever lost the love or much neglected the pursuit of learning; and afterwards, finding himself more inclined to civil employment, he laid down his commission, and engaged in business under the lord Townshend, then secretary of state, with whom he attended the king to Hanover".

His adherence to lord Townshend ended in nothing but a nomination (May, 1729) to be clerk-extraordinary of the Privy Council, which produced no immediate profit; for it only placed

Johnson wrote to West's cousin, Lord Westcote:-'I have another life in hand, that of Mr. West, about which I am quite at a loss; any information respecting him would be of great use.' John. Letters, ii. 188.

The poet's father, Dr. Richard West, with Robert Welsted, edited Pindar in 1697. His daughter married Admiral Hood, Viscount Bridport. Chatham Corres. ii. 439.

3 Ante, HAMMOND, 3; POPE, 202, 272. Her sister was the mother of Lords Lyttelton and Westcote. Burke's Peerage, under Lyttelton.

He matriculated on March 16, 1721-2,aged 18; B.A. 1725. Alumni Oxon.

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him in a state of expectation and right of succession, and it was very long before a vacancy admitted him to profit'.

3

Soon afterwards he married, and settled himself in a very 5 pleasant house at Wickham in Kent 2, where he devoted himself to learning and to piety. Of his learning the late Collection 3 exhibits evidence, which would have been yet fuller if the dissertations which accompany his version of Pindar had not been improperly omitted. Of his piety the influence has, I hope, been extended far by his Observations on the Resurrection, published in 17475, for which the University of Oxford created him a Doctor of Laws by diploma (March 30, 1748), and would doubtless have reached yet further had he lived to complete what he had for some time meditated, the Evidences of the truth of the New Testament. Perhaps it may not be without effect to tell that he read the prayers of the publick liturgy every morning to his family, and that on Sunday evening he called his servants into the parlour, and read to them first a sermon and then prayers. Crashaw is now not the only maker of verses to whom may be given the two venerable names of 'Poet and Saint'.' He was very often visited by Lyttelton and Pitt, who, when 6 they were weary of faction and debates, used at Wickham to

In The Royal Kalendar, 1816, p. 124, Charles C. F. Greville is entered as Clerk Extraordinary of the Privy Council. He entered in 1821 upon the duties of Clerk of the Council in Ordinary.' Greville Memoirs, Preface, p. 11. In the Kalendar for 1793, p. 87, there were four Extraordinary Clerks, waiting to step, each in his turn, into a dead man's shoes. Montague purchased for £1,500 the place of one of the Clerks of the Council.' Ante, HALIFAX, 5.

2 West Wickham, nearly three miles south-west of Bromley. Lewis's Top. Dict.

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In his Inscription on a SummerHouse West says of the spot :

And when too much repose brings on the spleen,

Or the gay city's idle pleasures

cloy; Swift as my changing wish I change the scene,

And now the country, now the town enjoy.'

Eng. Poets, lvii. 324.

For a description of him and his wife at Wickham see Mrs. Montagu's Letters, 1813, iii. 104.

3

Eng. Poets, lvii. 115.

The Odes of Pindar, with several other pieces in prose and verse, translated from the Greek, with a Dissertation on the Olympic Games. 1749, 4°. 5 In Dec. 1746. Gent. Mag. 1746, p. 672.

In the first edition the paragraph continued:-' and perhaps it may not be without effect to tell that he read prayers every evening to his family. Crashaw is now,' &c. For his Doctorate see Spence's Anec. p. 349.

7' Poet and Saint! to thee alone are
given

The two most sacred names of
Earth and Heaven.'

COWLEY, On the Death of Mr.
Crashaw, Eng. Poets, vii. 148.

Gibbon speaks of Lewis IX as 'disgraced by the title of Saint.' Memoirs, p. 71 n.

8 Shenstone wrote on May 2, 1761:-'The enmity betwixt Lord

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find books and quiet, a decent table, and literary conversation'. There is at Wickham a walk made by Pitt; and, what is of far more importance, at Wickham Lyttelton received that conviction which produced his Dissertation on St. Paul2.

These two illustrious friends had for a while listened to the blandishments of infidelity, and when West's book was published it was bought by some who did not know his change of opinion, in expectation of new objections against Christianity; and as Infidels do not want malignity, they revenged the disappointment by calling him a methodist 3.

Mr. West's income was not large, and his friends endeavoured, but without success, to obtain an augmentation. It is reported that the education of the young prince was offered to him, but that he required a more extensive power of superintendence than it was thought proper to allow him.

9 In time, however, his revenue was improved; he lived to have one of the lucrative clerkships of the Privy Council (1752)5, and

L-n [Lyttelton] and Mr. P- [Pitt] continues in its full force, insomuch that my Lord is to have no place while Mr. P continues in the ministry.' Shenstone's Works, 1791, iii. 323. Post, LYTTELTON, 18.

Here Lyttelton and his Lucy passed their bridal-night, and here, four years afterwards, in 1746, he wrote the Ode ending:'How much the wife is dearer than the bride.'

Eng. Poets, lxiv. 310. On Jan. 17, 1747, he wrote to his father:-' Gilbert West would be happy in the reputation his book has gained him, if my poor Lucy [post, LYTTELTON, 9] was not so ill. However, his mind leans always to hope.' Lyttelton's Misc. Works, p. 706.

It was probably Lyttelton who introduced West to Pope, who bequeathed him £5, 'to be laid out in a memorial,' and a reversionary interest in £200. Warton's Pope's Works, ix. 417.

2 Post, LYTTELTON, 12.

3 This paragraph is not in the first edition.

Fielding in Tom Jones (dedicated to Lyttelton in 1749) makes Blifil in

the last chapter turn Methodist, in hopes of marrying a very rich widow of that sect.' In Amelia (published two years later), Bk. i. ch. 4, he makes a thief declare himself a Methodist.' Mrs. Thrale, in 1780, wrote to Johnson:- Methodist is considered always a term of reproach, I trust, because I never yet did hear that any one person called himself a Methodist.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 119.

Cowper, on May 27, 1782, wrote of Rodney's great victory:-' Rodney is almost accounted a Methodist for ascribing his success to Providence.' Works, iv. 220.

Johnson defines Methodist in his Dict.: ' One of a new kind of Puritans lately arisen, so called from their profession to live by rules and in constant method.' See also Boswell's Johnson, i. 458.

* Afterwards George III. On the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales (March 20, 1751), Prince George was provided with a Governor, SubGovernor, Preceptor and Sub-Preceptor. Walpole's Letters, ii. 250. In April, 1752. Gent. Mag. 1752,

p. 193.

Mr. Pitt at last had it in his power to make him treasurer of Chelsea Hospital'.

He was now sufficiently rich, but wealth came too late to be 10 long enjoyed; nor could it secure him from the calamities of life: he lost (1755) his only son2, and the year after (March 26)3 a stroke of the palsy brought to the grave one of the few poets to whom the grave might be without its terrors *.

Of his translations I have only compared the first Olympick 11 Odes with the original, and found my expectation surpassed, both by its elegance and its exactness. He does not confine himself to his author's train of stanzas, for he saw that the difference of the languages required a different mode of versification. The first strophe is eminently happy; in the second he has a little strayed from Pindar's meaning, who says, 'if thou, my soul, wishest to speak of games, look not in the desert sky for a planet hotter than the sun, nor shall we tell of nobler games than those of Olympia". He is sometimes too paraphrastical. Pindar bestows upon Hiero an epithet, which, in one word, signifies delighting in horses'; a word which in the translation generates these lines:

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'Hiero's royal brows, whose care

Tends the courser's noble breed,
Pleas'd to nurse the pregnant mare,
Pleas'd to train the youthful steed?.'

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3 Ib. 1756, p. 150.

In the first edition, 'to whom the grave needed not to be terrible.'

The following paragraph followed: 'His poems are in this Collection neither selected nor arranged as I should have directed, had either the choice or the order fallen under my care or notice. His Institution of the Garter is improperly omitted; instead of the mock tragedy of Lucian the version from Euripides, if both could not be inserted, should have been taken. Of the Imitations of Spenser one was published before the version of Pindar, and should therefore have had the first place.'

In the republication of the Eng. Poets no change was made in West's Poems.

5 Eng. Poets, Ivii. 137.

'All that is left of Pindar's works
being on the same subject is the more
apt to be tiresome. This is what
induced me to desire Mr. West not
to translate the whole, but only to
choose out some of them.' POPE,
Spence's Anec. p. 178.
"Who along the desert air

Seeks the faded starry train,
When the sun's meridian car

Roundillumes th' aetherial plain?
Who a nobler theme can choose
Than Olympia's sacred games?
Who more apt to fire the Muse,
When her various songs she
frames?'

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