SYDENHAM, Ployer, a translator of Plato, was born in 1710, and graduated in arts at Wadham College, Oxford, in 1734. Between 1759 and 1780 he published translations of the Io, Greater and Lesser Hippias, Banquet, Rivals, Meno, First and Second Alcibiades and Philebus, in 3 vols. 4to. This translation was on the whole a very creditable one; in the more abstruse parts of Plato, the translator often missed the sense, but in the less abstract portions the version is excellent. It was completed in 1804 by Thomas Taylor. The subscribers to a work like this were few, and the learned and laborious, the "candid and gentle" author died in his old age in prison, where he had been incarcerated for a debt contracted for the barest necessities of life with an eating-house which he frequented. He died April 1st 1787. His other works were—A Dissertation on the Doctrine of Heraclitus, so far as it is mentioned or alluded to by Plato, 1775; Onomasticum Theologicum, 1784. Out of the facts connected with this melancholy end of Sydenham, the literary fund is said to have taken its rise.