mended by Gray, Whitehead softened what the latter disliked as satirical touches; but though he was through life more or less dependent on his social superiors, his nature was not servile, and his lack of ambition was largely due to self-knowledge (see the lines, ii. 192, addressed in 1751 to his friend Wright). In 1745 Whitehead, at the request of the Earl of Jersey, undertook the private tuition of his surviving son, Viscount Villiers, then a boy of seven years of age—who afterwards as Lord Jersey, was reputed one of the most high bred as well as one of the most fashionable men of his age—and a young companion [see Villiers, George Bussy, fourth Earl]. He accordingly removed to London, and shortly afterwards abandoned his fellowship, as its retention would have obliged him to take orders.
At Cambridge Whitehead had published his first more important poetic efforts, which showed him to have deliberately formed his style as a writer of verse upon Pope, at a time when English poetical literature was at last on the very point of widening its range as to both form and subjects. His epistle ‘On the Danger of writing in Verse’ (1741) is elegant in versification and diction, and modest in tone—two merits which are rarely absent in Whitehead. It was rapidly followed by ‘Atys and Adrastus’ (from Herodotus); an ‘heroic epistle’ from ‘Ann Boleyn to Henry the Eighth,’ the reverse of original in treatment, but delicate in feeling; and a readable didactic essay on ‘Ridicule’ (1743), protesting against such as is excessive or misplaced. All these pieces, as well as the rather later ‘Hymn to the Nymph of Bristol Spring’ (1751), are in the heroic couplet.
Within these years Whitehead became well known in the world of letters and of the theatre, and on 24 Feb. 1750 Garrick (to whom he had addressed a very judicious compliment in verse, containing a characteristic hint as to the morals of the stage; Works, ii. 176) brought out at Drury Lane his tragedy of the ‘Roman Father.’ It is founded more or less on Corneille's ‘Horace;’ but it omits the part of Horatius's wife, sister to the Curiatii, and it seeks to centre the interest in Horatius's father, the character played by Garrick. Though it was a theatrical success, this tragedy is but a poor piece of literary work, and in execution one of the least adequate of Whitehead's performances. His second tragedy, ‘Creusa, Queen of Athens’ (first acted on 20 April 1754), a recast of the Euripidean ‘Ion,’ with the supernatural element omitted, is far superior to its predecessor in skilfulness of construction and in dignity of style, and deserves the high praise bestowed on it by Horace Walpole (to John Chute, Letters, ed. Cunningham, ii. 382) and by Mason. These constitute Whitehead's only essays in the tragic drama, unless there should be included in them the rather clever burlesque, ‘tragedy in the heroic taste,’ of ‘Fatal Constancy, or Love in Tears,’ spoken in monologue by the hero.
A parody with a more serious purpose is the city idyll, as it would perhaps be called in these days, of ‘The Sweepers,’ written in blank verse. In form Whitehead's versatility was remarkable, and about this time he produced a series of tales in (four-foot iambic) verse, something in the manner of Prior, but more nearly perhaps in that of La Fontaine, which possess decided merit of their kind. Such are ‘Variety, a Tale for Married People;’ ‘The Goat's Beard,’ a free expansion of one of Phædrus's fables, which playfully discusses the question of equality between the sexes; and others. These, with a number of vers de société and complimentary pieces, make up an agreeable variety of miscellaneous verse; and it would have been fortunate for Whitehead's posthumous fame had he not been called upon to put a pretentious top to so unpretending an edifice. He wrote little in prose—a disquisition, of no moment, on the shield of Æneas, and a light essay or two for insertion in ‘The World.’ In June 1754 he accompanied his pupil, Lord Villiers, and Lord Nuneham, the eldest son of the Earl of Harcourt, to Leipzig. A tour in Germany and Italy followed, and the travellers did not return to England till the autumn of 1756. The ‘Elegies’ in which Whitehead commemorated their visits to the mausoleum of Augustus and other places of interest have not permanently added to his poetic fame; but they were not inopportunely written. While still in Italy he had been appointed by the Duke of Newcastle, through the influence of Lady Jersey, to the ‘two genteel patent places usually united’ of secretary and registrar of the order of the Bath; and when, in December 1757, Colley Cibber passed away, the Duke of Devonshire, as lord chamberlain, offered to Whitehead the poet-laureateship, which had been previously refused by Gray [see Gray, Thomas]. The latter was to have been permitted to hold it as a sinecure; but Whitehead's muse was called upon in the usual way, and executed herself in a series of birthday odes extending over more than a quarter of a century, as well as of special effusions on occasions such as a peace or a royal marriage. A selection of the birthday odes is published in the poet's works, but cannot be said to call for posthumous cri-
