for, this general ignorance of all save our greatest writers. The history of our literature is biographical. Its annals teach by examples. And so we speak of the age of Dryden, and of Pope, and of Johnson, as if the literature of each of the eras was represented by these men alone, and there was no work for others to do in it. The long line of light is shed through the dark centuries by the great stars. Where they shine at distant intervals the heaven is blacker, but need we close our eyes to the twinklings of those lesser fires, without whose ray the interspace were darkness?
W. Whitehead was born in the parish of St. Botolph's, in the town of Cambridge. He was the son of a baker, whose notoriety for worldly waste and mismanagement has been perpetuated by the nickname of "Whitehead's Folly" being given to a few acres of land, on which he expended large sums of money "in ornamenting rather than cultivating." Mr. Mason has penned an elaborate apology for the poet's humble parentage, and Mr. Campbell has ridiculed Mr. Mason for a defence so needless. William was the second son; his elder brother John was educated for the Church, and, by the interest of Lord Montfort, obtained the living of Penshore in the diocese of Worcester. The baker's taste for model farming so involved him, that he died considerably in debt; and the subject of this memoir, from the profits of his theatrical writings, most honourably discharged the claims of his creditors. Mr. Mason speaks of this conduct of his friend with exultation, and for once indulges a facetious vein in terming it "a rare instance of poetical justice."
Whitehead was at first sent to a school in Cambridge, and thence removed to Winchester. Mr. Mason quotes an account given of him by Dr. Balguy, who, as Canon of Winchester Cathedral, had enjoyed opportunities of procuring some information in reference to Whitehead's
