THE Sect of the Quakers has produced but few poets;
nor is this circumstance to be wondered at, as the
kind of mental discipline under which its members
are trained, though it may be calculated to make
them estimable as men, is of too austere a nature to
be favourable to the expansion of talent. I do not
remember that, before JOHN SCOTT, the subject of
this memoir, a single poet had appeared in that sect.
His father, a quaker, and a man of irreproachable
conduct, was a draper and a citizen of London. John
Scott was his youngest son, and was born in the
Grange Walk, in the parish of St. Mary Magdalen,
Bermondsey, on the ninth of January, 1730.
The early education of the poet was of a very li-
mited kind. At the age of seven years he began to
be instructed at home in the rudiments of the Latin
language, by John Clarke, a Scotchman, who kept a
school in Bermondsey-street. This tutor is said to
have been a man of severe manners; but as, in later
life, his pupil remembered him with pleasure, his