gent 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. He was born about 1710, and educated at Westminster-school; but it does not appear that he was of any university. 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. Catherine Dashwood, better known as Kitty Dashwood, afterwards one of the bedchamber women to Charlotte, queen of George III. Walpole calls her (writing in 1761) "the famous old beauty of the Oxfordshire Jacobites." -Letter to Mann, Sept. 10, 1761. Amidst the gossip of the last century, I shall perhaps be forgiven for recording that my old acquaintance Lady Corke, who died in 1840 at the age of ninety-four, told me that she had known Kitty Dashwood very well, and that Hammond undoubtedly died for love: "the only instance of the kind," she said, "that she had known in her long life." Kitty had at first accepted, but afterwards rejected him, on-Lady Corke, and indeed all Kitty's contemporaries thought—prudential reasons.-CROKER: Preface to Lord Hervey's Memoirs, p. xxx. 5 This account is still erroneous. James Hammond, author of the Elegies,' was the second son of Anthony Hammond, of Somersham Place, in the county of Huntingdon, Esq., to whom, in 1694, Southerne dedicated his 'Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery.' ('Gent.'s Mag.' for 1787, p. 780, and Brydges's 'Autobiography,' vol. ii. p. 11.) The poet's grand-uncle was William Hammond, Esq., of St. Alban's Court, in Nonington, Kent, author of a volume of poems, published 1655, and reprinted in 1816 by Sir Egerton Brydges. 6 Frederick Prince of Wales, father of George III. 1710-1742. HIS ELEGIES. 331 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 [7th June, 1742] at Stowe, the famous seat of the 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." The Elegies were published after his death; and while the writer's name was remembered 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. 7 By his will, a very short and informal one, dated Paris, 5th Feb. 1729-30, he leaves Erasmus Lewis, of Cork Street, his sole executor, in trust for his mother, Jane Hammond. Lewis refused to act, and the mother administered. Two administrations were made after the mother's death-the last in 1755 by George Dowdeswell, Esq. He directs his body to be buried where he died. In the administration he is described as of St. George's, Hanover Square. Nicholas Hammond, Esq., who died Oct. 13, 1733, left him 4001. a year. -Gent.'s Mag. for 1781, p. 318. • 'Love Elegies,' written in the year 1732. Virginibus puerisque canto. London: printed for G. Hawkins, &c., fol., 1745. "Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.-JOHNSON of Lycidas: Life of Milton. Like other lovers, he threatens the lady with dying; and what then shall follow ? "Wilt thou in tears thy lover's corse attend; And cull my ashes with thy trembling hand: And all the pride of Asia's fragrant year, Give them the treasures of the farthest East, And what is still more precious, give thy tear." 10 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,11 whose knowledge of English metre was not inconsiderable, to be the most magnificent of all the measures which our language affords. 10 I have Johnson's own copy of Hammond, in which these stanzas are marked by Johnson with one of those "red lines" to which he alludes in his letter to Reynolds, returning Crabbe's MS. of The Village.' I may add that the volume-a small duodecimo, printed by the Foulis in 1771-contains also the Poems of Collins, and has this inscription, in Boswell's own handwriting: "To Samuel Johnson, LL.D., from his most affectionate and grateful friend, James Boswell." 11 Account of Annus Mirabilis, in a letter to Sir Robert Howard, 1667. Sure Hammond has no right to the least inventive merit. I do not think that there is a single thought in his 'Elegies' of any eminence that is not literally translated. I am astonished he could content himself with being so little an original. . . I question whether he had taken without the interest of his genteel acquaintance, or indeed if the author had not died precedently.-SHENSTONE: Letters. There is as much nature in the amatory effusions of Southey's 'Abel Shufflebottom' as in the whole of Hammond's 'Elegies.' All that Hammond has done was to new heat the cold meats of antiquity. Yet he is praised (Pope's Works, ii. 283) by Joseph Warton, no mean judge. |
