accepted by Garrick, and performed at Drury Lane, 11th of February, 1762. The plan is taken from a play of Fontenelle's, called "Le Testament." The dedication is strange, and runs thus: "To the memory of Monsieur de Fontenelle this comedy is inscribed, by a lover of simplicity, the Author." Garrick played Sir John Dorilant, and Mrs. Clive, Mrs. Cibber, and Mrs. Yates took the three female characters. The dialogue is sprightly and elegant, and the plot clear and well-arranged; but it is all love, love ab ovo usque ad mala. It is a good sentimental comedy, and with such acting as Garrick's and Mrs. Cibber's was not unlikely to be successful.
In the same year he gave to the world his Charge to the poets. Coleridge in his "Biographia Literaria," says: "Whitehead, exerting the prerogative of his Laureateship, addressed to youthful poets a poetic charge which is perhaps the best, and certainly the most interesting of his works." Had Coleridge carefully compared the various compositions of the Laureate, he could scarcely have ranked this with any of his dramatic writings, and it is inferior to some of his other poems. As Laureate, he supposes himself standing in the position of a bishop to his poetic brethren, who are the inferior clergy. That this is heavy humour, will appear without reading the poem. But if examined, it will be found, notwithstanding the foregoing criticism of Coleridge, that the execution is scarcely superior to the design. It had, however, the effect of exciting the wrath and satire of Churchill. He who "blazed the comet of a season," could not brook Whitehead's seeming arrogance in venturing to teach him and others, simply because fortune had conferred on him the laurel. Churchill, therefore, in the third book of a poem which he published soon after, assailed Whitehead in an invocation, in which he distinguishes the Laureate from Paul Whitehead, a
