Each spangled back bright sprinkling specks adorn, JOHN SCOTT. BORN 1730.-DIED 1783. THIS HIS worthy and poetical quaker was the son of a draper, in London, and was born in the borough of Southwark. His father retired to Amwell, in Hertfordshire, when our poet was only ten years old; and this removal, together with the circumstance of his never having been inoculated for the small-pox, proved an unfortunate impediment to his education. He was put to a day-school, in the neighbouring town of Ware, where not much instruction was to be had; and from that little he was called away, upon the first alarm of infection. Such indeed was his constant apprehension of the disease, that he lived for twenty years within twenty miles of London without visiting it more than once. About the age of seventeen, however, he betook himself to reading. His family, from their cast of opinions and society, were not likely to abound either in books or conversation relating to literature; but he happened to form an acquaintance and friendship with a neighbour of the name of Frogley, a master bricklayer, who, though an uneducated man, was an admirer of poetry, and by his intercourse with this friend he strengthened his literary propensity. His first poetical essays were transmitted to the Gentleman's Magazine. In his thirtieth year he published four elegies, which were favourably received. His poems, entitled "The Garden," and "Amwell," and his volume of collected poetical pieces, appeared after considerable intervals; and his "Critical Essays on the English Poets" were published in the last year of his life. These, with his "Remarks on the Poems of Rowley," are all that can be called his literary productions. He published also two political tracts, in answer to Dr. Johnson's " Patriot," and "False Alarm." His critical essays contain some judicious remarks on Denham and Dyer; but his verbal strictures on Collins and Goldsmith discover a miserable insensibility to the soul of those poets. His own verses are chiefly interesting, where they breathe the pacific principles of the quaker; while his personal character engages respect, from exhibiting a public spirit and liberal taste, beyond the habits of his brethren. He was well informed in the laws of his country; and, though prevented by his tenets from becoming a magistrate, he made himself useful to the inhabitants of Amwell, by his offices of arbitration, and by promoting schemes of local improvement. He was constant in his attendance at turnpike meetings, navigation trusts, and commissions of land-tax. Ware and Hertford were indebted to him for the plan of opening a spacious road between those two His treatises on the highway and parochial laws were the result of long and laudable attention to those subjects. towns. His verses, and his amiable character, gained him by degrees a large circle of literary acquaintance, which included Dr. Johnson, Sir William Jones, Mrs. Montague, and many other distinguished individuals; and having submitted to inoculation, in his thirty-sixth year, he was from that period more frequently in London. In his retirement he was fond of gardening; and, in amusing himself with the improvement of his grounds, had excavated a grotto in the side of a hill, which his biographer, Mr. Hoole, writing in 1785, says, was still shewn as a curiosity in that part of the country. He was twice married. His first wife was the daughter of his friend Frogley. He died at a house in Radcliff, of a putrid fever. ODE ON HEARING THE DRUM. I HATE that drum's discordant sound, To sell their liberty for charms Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms; And when ambition's voice commands, To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands. I hate that drum's discordant sound, And burning towns, and ruin'd swains, ODE ON PRIVATEERING. How custom steels the human breast The man he never saw before, VOL. V. FF Of decks with streaming crimson dy'd, The merchant now on foreign shores And yet, such man's misjudging mind, If glory thus be earn'd, for me |