He took a different view of this important theme in "Thoughts on Eternity".
Ambrose Philips.
But for his friendship with Addison and the collision of his "Pastorals," with those of Pope, producing Pope's famous ironical review, Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) would scarcely be remembered. The modern art of "booming" was illustrated in Philips's case. A whole 'Spectator' was devoted to a puff of his adaptation ("The Distressed Mother") of the "Andromache" of Racine: and another told how it affected Sir Roger de Coverley. As has occasionally happened more recently, though advertised by Addison, and by his own threat to birch Pope, "Philips became ridiculous, without his own fault, by the absurd admiration of his friends," and his Christian name, Ambrose, became the ludicrous nickname, Namby-pamby. But for Philips there was not lacking a patron, Boulter, Primate of Ireland, and in Ireland places were found for the exile. Philips translated several Odes of Pindar, and though he had not the pinion of the Theban eagle, the sentiments of Pindar are plainly visible in his versions.
Tickell.
Among the minor stars in the golden galaxy of Queen Anne's reign scrutiny detects Thomas Tickell. (Born in Cumberland in 1686, educated at Queen's, Oxford.) He is best remembered in connexion with Pope's story that to damage his translation of the "Iliad," Addison translated the First Book and published it, averring that Tickell was the author. That Addison was guilty of a villainous action is, says Macaulay, highly improbable, that Tickell was capable of a villainy is highly improbable, that the twain were united in a base conspiracy is improbable "out of all whooping". But that Pope's mind, resentful, brooding, and inventive, came to believe in the conspiracy, is, unfortunately, only too natural. We know the figments of all sorts which the imagination of Shelley imposed on him: they were, at least, more romantic than the figments of Pope. In both cases there is a resemblance to the fancy of persecutions which haunts the insane.
Tickell had the honour and happiness to be a friend of Addison, and wrote verses commendatory of his opera, "Rosamond," and of his tragedy, "Cato". His translation of the First Book of the "Iliad" is really good, when we consider the poetic conventions of the age, and the inevitable use of the rhyming heroic couplets. He who would estimate the difficulties of Pope's and Tickell's task, should endeavour, himself, to do a few of the lines of Homer into the classical metre of Queen Anne's day. When Tickell makes Agamemnon, speaking of Chryseis, say
Not Clytæmnestra boasts a nobler race,
A sweeter temper, or a lovelier face,
he is comically remote from what Agamemnon does say in Homer, and the sweetness of Clytæmnestra's temper was never famous. Tickell's "Thou fierce-looked talker with a coward soul" is much less spirited and literal than Pope's "Thou dog in forehead and in heart a deer" ("Drunkard, with eyes of dog and heart of deer," is the literal version). Tickell, more bound by the taste of his age than Pope, shirks the dog and deer. None the less Tickell's version is spirited and lucid; the course of events can be easily followed: the reader is enabled to understand the tragic situation from which the whole epic evolves itself. If Pope had not written, if Tickell had finished his version as well as he began it, he would have satisfied public taste, and won considerable fame.
Tickell, following Addison, was a Whig, "most Whiggish of Whigs," Swift said. This makes his line on "An Original Picture of King Charles I, Taken at the Time of His Trial," all the more curious. The portrait, of which several replicas exist, was mezzotinted from the All Souls' copy in Tickell's day, about 1714. (Bower was the painter.)
How meagre, pale, neglected, worn with care,
What steady sadness and august despair!