COOPER, John Gilbert, a miscellaneous writer, was born in 1723, and descended from an ancient family in the county of Nottingham, whose fortune was injured in the last century by their attachment to the principles of monarchy. He resided at Thurgarton Priory, in Nottinghamshire, which had been granted by King Henry VIII. to William Cooper, one of his ancestors. This mansion Mr Cooper inherited from his father, who in 1739 was high sheriff of the county, and transmitted it to his son, who filled the same respectable office in 1783. After passing through Westminster school under Dr John Nicoll, along with Lord Albemarle, Lord Buckinghamshire, Major Johnson, Mr George Ashby, and many other eminent and ingenious persons, he became, in 1743, a fellow commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge, and resided there two or three years; but he quitted the university on his marriage with Susanna, the daughter of William Wright, Esq. son of the lord keeper of that name, and also recorder of Leicester from 1729 to 1763. In the year 1745 he commenced author, by the publication of The Power of Harmony, a poem, in 4to; and in 1746 and 1747 he produced several essays and poems under the signature of Philalethes, in a periodical work called The Museum, published by Mr Dodsey. In the same year he came forward as an author, under his own name, in a work which received much assistance from his friend the Rev. John Jackson of Leicester, who communicated several learned notes, in which he contrived to manifest his dislike to his formidable antagonist Mr Warburton. It was entitled The Life of Socrates, collected from the Memorabilia of Xenophon and the Dialogues of Plato, and illustrated further by Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Cicero, Proclus, Apuleius, Maximus Tyrius, Boethius, Diogenes Laertius, Aulus Gellius, and others, 1749, 8vo. In this work Mr Cooper gave evident marks of a superior genius, warm, impetuous, and impatient of restraint. In 1754 Mr Cooper published his Letters on Taste, 8vo; an elegant little volume, on which no small share of his reputation is founded; and in 1755 appeared The Tomb of Shakespeare, a Vision, 4to; a tolerable performance, in which, however, there is more of wit and application than of nature or genius. In 1756 he assisted Mr Moore, by writing some numbers of the World; and he attempted to rouse the indignation of his countrymen against the Hessians, who had recently been brought over to defend the nation, in a poem called The Genius of Britain, addressed to Mr Pitt. In 1758 he published Epistles to the Great, from Aristippus in Retirement, 4to; The Call of Aristippus, Epistle IV. to Mark Akenside, M.D.; and also, A Father's Advice to his Son, in 4to. In the Annual Register of the same year appeared his Translation of an Epistle from the King of Prussia to Monsieur Voltaire. In 1759 he published Ver Vert, or the Nunnery Parrot, an Heroic Poem, in four cantos, inscribed to the Abbess of D. translated from the French of Monsieur Gresset, 4to, and reprinted in the first volume of Dilly's Repository, 1777; and, in 1764, Poems on Several Subjects, by the Author of the Life of Socrates, with a prefatory advertisement by Mr Dodsey. In this little volume were included all the separate poetical pieces which have been already mentioned, excepting Ver Vert, which is a sprightly composition. Mr Cooper died at his father's house in May Fair, on the 17th of April 1769, after a long and excruciating illness arising from calculus in the bladder.