THOMAS, an English poet, who holds a high place among the minor minstrels of his country, was born at Bridgekirk, in Cumberland, in 1686. He entered Queen's College, Oxford, in 1701, graduated in 1708, and became a fellow in 1710. He is said to have gained the favourable notice of Addison by some verses which he published in praise of that writer's Rosamond. On Addison's promotion to be secretary of state, Tickell was made under-secretary in 1717. He had already published in 1713 his Prospect of Peace, and next year he sang the praises of the Royal Progress. In June 1715 he published a poetical translation of the first book of the Iliad, some lines of which Dr Johnson preferred to the contemporary version of Pope, although, as a whole, it was very inferior to it. The only poem of more than temporary celebrity is his Colin and Lucy, which Gray, in a letter to H. Walpole, says, he has "always thought the prettiest in the world." Goldsmith pronounces Tickell's Elegy on Addison "one of the finest odes in our language," and Johnson declares that "a more sublime or elegant funeral poem is not to be found in the whole compass of English literature;" while Steele, again, alleges that it is only "prose in rhyme." Though neither very tender nor very imaginative, it nevertheless possesses many of the qualities of true poetry. Tickell held the office of secretary to the Lords-Justices of Ireland from 1725 till his death in 1740.