John, a celebrated English writer, was born about the year 1719; though his epitaph, as we find it in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1781, makes him to have been born in 1715. He was brought up to a mechanical profession, that of a watchmaker as supposed. He was of the presbyterian persuasion, and a member of the celebrated Tom Bradbury's meeting, from which he was expelled for some irregularities. He afterwards devoted himself to literature, and became an author of considerable eminence. In the early part of life his circumstances were rather confined. He resided some time at Bromley in Kent, where his wife kept a boarding-school. He afterwards became known to a lady who had great property and interest in the East India company, and through her means was chosen a director of that body. As an author, his Adventurer is his capital work; the merits of which, if we mistake not, procured him the degree of LL.D. from Herring archbishop of Canterbury. When the design of compiling a narrative of the discoveries in the South Seas was on foot, he was recommended as a proper person to be employed on the occasion: but in truth he was not a proper person, nor did the performance answer expectation. Works of taste and elegance, where imagination and the passions were to be affected, were his province; not works of dry, cold, accurate narrative. However, he executed his task, and is said to have received for it the enormous sum of 600l. He died in 1773; some say of high living; others of chagrin from the ill reception of his Narrative: for he was a man of the keenest sensibility, and obnoxious to all the evils of such irritable natures. On a handsome marble monument erected to his memory at Bromley in Kent is an inscription, of which the following is a part taken from the last number of The Adventurer:

"The hour is halting, in which whatever praise or censure I have acquired will be remembered with equal indifference. Time, who is impatient to date my last paper, will shortly moulder the hand which is now writing in the dust, and still the breath that now throbs at the reflection. But let not this be read as something that relates only to another; for a few years only can divide the eye that is now reading from the hand that has written."