PAUL WHITEHEAD, THE POET TAILOR.
“He lived a poet in this town
(If we may term our modern writers poets),
Sharp-witted, bitter-tongued, his pen of steel.
His ink was temper’d with the biting juice,
And extracts of the bitterest weeds that grew.
He never wrote but when the elements
Of fire and water tilted in his brain.”
Heywood: Fair Maid of the Exchange.
Among the tailors who have been authors, Paul Whitehead takes a very respectable rank; which is more, I am sorry to say, than he does among men. The career of the two Whiteheads has a moral in it. William, the son of a Cambridge baker, was, like Paul, the tailor’s son, a most successful tuft-hunter; but then he hunted chiefly after patricians of principle,—of good principle. William was a gentle lad; he walked through the university of his native city with quiet credit, and passed into Lord Grey’s family as private tutor; where he taught mildly, and wrote classical tragedies of so soporific a nature, that the reading of them might safely be recommended to the sleepless by hypnologists. William the baker was a highly respectable and never-too-soon-to-be-forgotten individual.