BLOUNT, THOMAS, a learned English writer of the seventeenth century, born at Bordesley in Worcestershire. He had not the advantage of a university education; but, by strength of genius and great application, he made a considerable progress in literature. Upon the breaking out of the Popish plot in the reign of King Charles II. he was much alarmed on account of his reputation as a zealous Catholic; and being seized with a palsy, he died in December, 1679, aged sixty-one. He wrote, 1. The Academy of Eloquence, containing a complete English rhetoric; 2. Glossographia, or a Dictionary interpreting such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, &c. as are now used in our refined English tongue; 3. Boscobel, or the History of his Majesty's Escape after the Battle of Worcester; 4. A Law Dictionary; 5. Animadversions upon Sir Richard Baker's Chronicle; 6. Fragmenta Antiquitatis; and other works.