This Gentleman, known to the world
by the Love Elegies, which some years after his death
were published by the Earl of Chesterfield, was the
son of a Turkey merchant, in the city of London.
We cannot ascertain where he received his education;
but it does not appear that he was at any of the universities.
Mr. Hammond was early preferred to a place about the
person of the late Prince of Wales, which he held till
an unfortunate accident stript him of his reason,
or at least so affected his imagination, that his
senses were greatly disordered. The unhappy cause
of his calamity was a passion he entertained for one
Miss Dashwood, which proved unsuccessful. Upon
this occasion it was that he wrote his Love Elegies,
which have been much celebrated for their tenderness.
The lady either could not return his passion with
a reciprocal fondness, or entertained too ambitious
views to settle her affections upon him, which he
himself in some of his Elegies seems to hint; for he
frequently mentions her passion for gold and splendour,
and justly treats it as very unworthy a fair one’s
bosom. The chief beauty of these Elegies certainly
consists in their being written by a man who intimately
felt the subject; for they are more the language of
the heart than of the head. They have warmth,
but little poetry, and Mr. Hammond seems to have been
one of those poets, who are made so by love, not by
nature.
Mr. Hammond died in the year 1743,
in the thirty-first year of his age, at Stow, the
seat of his kind patron, the lord Cobham, who honoured
him with a particular intimacy. The editor of
Mr. Hammond’s Elegies observes, that he composed
them before he was 21 years of age; a period, says
he, when fancy and imagination commonly riot at the
expence of judgment and correctness. He was sincere
in his love, as in his friendship; he wrote to his
mistress, as he spoke to his friends, nothing but
the true genuine sentiments of his heart. Tibullus
seems to have been the model our author judiciously
preferred to Ovid; the former writing directly from
the heart to the heart, the latter too often yielding
and addressing himself to the imagination.
As a specimen of Mr. Hammond’s
turn for Elegiac Poetry, we shall quote his third
Elegy, in which he upbraids and threatens the avarice
of Neaera, and resolves to quit her.
Should Jove descend in floods
of liquid ore,
And golden torrents stream from every
part,
That craving bosom still would
heave for more,
Not all the Gods cou’d satisfy thy
heart.
But may thy folly, which can
thus disdain
My honest love, the mighty wrong repay,
May midnight-fire involve
thy sordid gain,
And on the shining heaps of rapine prey.
May all the youths, like me,
by love deceiv’d,
Not quench the ruin, but applaud the doom,
And when thou dy’st,
may not one heart be griev’d:
May not one tear bedew the lonely tomb.
But the deserving, tender,
gen’rous maid,
Whose only care is her poor lover’s
mind,
Tho’ ruthless age may
bid her beauty fade,
In every friend to love, a friend shall
find.
And when the lamp of life
will burn no more,
When dead, she seems as in a gentle sleep,
The pitying neighbour shall
her loss deplore;
And round the bier assembled lovers weep.
With flow’ry garlands,
each revolving year
Shall strow the grave, where truth and
softness rest,
Then home returning drop the
pious tear,
And bid the turff lie easy on her breast.