TATE, NAHUM (1652-1715)

—Poet, s. of a clergyman in Dublin, was ed. at Trinity Coll. there. He pub. Poems on Several Occasions (1677), Panacea, or a Poem on Tea , and, in collaboration with Dryden, the second part of Absalom and Achitophel . He also adapted Shakespeare's Richard II. and Lear , making what he considered improvements. Thus in Lear Cordelia is made to survive her f. , and marry Edgar. This desecration, which was defended by Dr. Johnson, kept the stage till well on in the 19th century. He also wrote various miscellaneous poems, now happily forgotten. He is best remembered as the Tate of Tate and Brady's metrical version of the Psalms, pub. in 1696. T., who succeeded Shad well as Poet Laureate in 1690, figures in The Dunciad . NICHOLAS BRADY (1659-1726).—Tate's fellow-versifier of the Psalms, b. at Bandon, and ed. at Westminster and Oxf., was incumbent of Str at ford-on-Avon. He wrote a tragedy, The Rape , a blank verse translation of the Æneid , an Ode , and sermons, now all forgotten. TATHAM, JOHN ( fl. 1632-1664). —Dramatist. Little is known of him. He produced pageants for the Lord Mayor's show and some dramas, Love Crowns the End , The Distracted State , The Scots Figgaries, or a Knot of Knaves , The Rump , etc. He was a Cavalier, who hated the Puritans and the Scotch, and invented a dialect which he believed to be their vernacular tongue.