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Tickell omitted it in his collection; but the testimony of Steele, and the total silence of any other claimant, has determined the public to assign it to Addison, and it is now printed with other poetry. Steele carried The Drummer to the play-house, and afterwards to the press, and sold the copy for fifty guineas.
Steele once promised Congreve and the public a complete description of his character; but the promises of authors are like the vows of lovers. Steele thought no more on his design, or thought on it with anxiety that at last disgusted him, and left his friend in the hands of Tickell. One slight lineament of his character Swift has preserved.
Had such turns of expression been discovered, they would be sufficiently accounted for by supposing Addison to have corrected his friend's lines, as he owned that he had done. Is there anything in the character of the accused persons which makes the accusation probable? We answer confidently nothing. Tickell was long after this time described by Pope himself as a very fair and worthy man.
Steele's ambition, no doubt, was that he and his friend should go down to posterity together, but the appointment of Tickell instead of himself as Addison's literary executor dashed this hope to the ground. Few things in literary biography are more pathetic than the estrangement between Addison and Steele.
He held his fellowship till 1726, and then vacated it by marrying, in that year, at Dublin. Tickell was not one of those scholars who wear away their lives in closets; he entered early into the world and was long busy in public affairs, in which he was initiated under the patronage of Addison, whose notice he is said to have gained by his verses in praise of Rosamond.
Steele himself says, in his celebrated letter to Congreve, that Addison, by his preference of Tickell, "incurred the warmest resentment of other gentlemen"; and everything seems to indicate that, of those resentful gentlemen, Steele was himself one. While poor Sir Richard was brooding over what he considered as Addison's unkindness, a new cause of quarrel arose.
Addison, all he had a right to; and in his letter to Congreve, he declares that Addison's papers were marked by him, out of tenderness to his friend, and a warm zeal for his fame. Steel was a generous grateful friend; it therefore ill became Mr. Tickell in the defence of Mr.
The two principal productions of Tickell, the "Wreath of Fashion" and "Anticipation," were both upon temporary subjects, and have accordingly passed into oblivion. As Sheridan is the hero of the Wreath of Fashion, it is but right to quote the verses that relate to him; and I do it with the more pleasure, because they also contain a well-merited tribute to Mrs. Sheridan.
Some verses by Tickell are mentioned as having supplied one of the best stanzas; but I am inclined to think, from the following circumstances, that this theft of Sheridan was of that venial and domestic kind from himself. "In a song which I purchased at Bland's music-shop in Holborn in the year 1794, intitled, 'Think not, my love' and professing to be set to music by Thomas Wright.
The truth probably is, that Steele wished to leave as undefined as possible what belonged to Addison and what belonged to himself; that he was greatly annoyed when he found that their respective shares were by Addison's own, or at least his alleged, request to be defined; that in his assignation of the papers he had not been quite honest; and that, knowing this, he suspected that Tickell knew it too.
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