ticism. In his own day the series at large was visited with much unfriendly comment. Johnson, who seems to have felt no particular gratitude to Whitehead for having helped to make the plan of his dictionary known to Chesterfield (Boswell, Life, ed. J. Birkbeck Hill, i. 184; see also Hawkins, Life, 2nd edit. 1787, p. 176), compared Cibber's birthday odes with Whitehead's, to the disadvantage of the latter; for ‘grand nonsense is insupportable’ (ib. i. 402). John Byrom [q. v.], the Lancashire poet, in 1758 coupled Whitehead's ‘Verses to the People of England’ with Akenside's ‘Appeal to the Country Gentlemen of England’ as illustrative of the jingoism of the hour (Poems of John Byrom, printed for the Chetham Soc., 1894, i. 459). Churchill, who had suddenly sprung into fame and was beginning to pour forth volume after volume of furious invective, in bk. iii. of ‘The Ghost’ (1762) apostrophised the laureate as ‘Dulness and Method's darling Son.’ Whitehead but once made a public reply to these and other attacks in ‘A Charge to the Poets’ (first printed in 1762), which introduces itself as a sort of sequel to his early poem on ‘The Danger of writing in Verse,’ and, in the humorous form of a charge from the laureate to his brother poets, very reasonably and very good-humouredly explains and defends his position. In ‘A Pathetic Apology for all Laureates, past, present, and to come,’ privately circulated among his friends, he put the matter still more plainly, and with the same modest bonhomie. And whether or not he actually cherished the design of replying to Churchill in a longer poem, he was wise enough never to carry it out, though the fragments which remain are in part generous as well as essentially just in spirit.
In the year in which Churchill had sought to write down the laureate dunce and fool, he had produced at Drury Lane on 10 Feb. his comedy of ‘The School for Lovers’ (1762), which has been erroneously supposed to belong to the species called sentimental comedy. The life of the play is to be found in the characters of Araminta and Modely, which are genuinely comic, while the former is also unmistakably attractive (cf. Genest, iv. 640). The success of this comedy (which was revived in 1775 and 1794) seems to have increased Garrick's confidence in Whitehead, who in the following years officiated as his ‘reader’ of plays. When in 1767 Garrick was hesitating as to the production of Goldsmith's ‘Good-natured Man,’ he proposed Whitehead, who for some time acted as reader of new plays for Drury Lane, to him as arbitrator in the difficulty—‘of all the manager's slights to the poet,’ according to the biographer of the latter, that which was ‘forgotten last’ (Forster, Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 5th edit. 1871, ii. 41). On 6 Jan. 1770 Whitehead's ‘Trip to Scotland’ was performed at Drury Lane, which may be described as a farce ending like an extravaganza.
For many years after his return from the continent Whitehead remained the welcome household friend of Lords Jersey and Harcourt, and resided in the town house of the former, and in the summer at Middleton and at Nuneham, of which frequent mention is made in his verse, and where some lines by him on the gardener, Walter Clark, are stated as still to be seen in the grounds. After the death of Lord Jersey in 1769, and the accession to the title of his former pupil, Whitehead occupied apartments in London, but still kept up his intimacy with both families. In 1774 he collected his works in two volumes, under the title of ‘Plays and Poems.’ A tragedy, offered to Garrick, but never published; the first act of an ‘Œdipus;’ and one or two other dramatic fragments were found among his papers at the time of his death, which took place in Charles Street, Grosvenor Square, on 14 April 1785.
A complete edition of Whitehead's poems, with a good memoir by his friend William Mason (1724–1797) [q. v.], was published at York in 1788 (3 vols. 8vo). A half-length life-sized portrait of Whitehead was painted by R. Wilson (Cat. Guelph Exhib. No. 238). Another, painted by W. Doughty in 1776, was engraved by Collyer, and prefixed to vol. iii. of Mason's edition of Whitehead's ‘Works.’
[Memoirs by Mason in collected edition of Whitehead's Poems, 3 vols. 1788; Chalmers's English Poets, vol. xvii.; Genest's Some Account of the English Stage, vols. iv. and v.; Doyle's Official Baronage.]
WHITEHORNE. [See Whithorne.]
WHITEHURST, JOHN (1713–1788), horologer, born at Congleton in Cheshire on 10 April 1713, was the son of John Whitehurst, a clock and watch maker of that place. His early education was slight, and on leaving school he was bred by his father in his own trade. His father, who was a man of inquisitive turn, encouraged him in his passion for knowledge, which led him at the age of twenty-one to visit Dublin in order to inspect a clock of curious construction of which he had heard.
About 1736 he entered into business for himself at Derby, where he soon obtained great employment, distinguishing himself
