an English poet of considerable note, was born at Shelton, near Newcastle-under-Lyme, in Staffordshire, on the 20th of May 1683. Being the youngest of twelve children, he was destined for the church as a profession; and with this view he was admitted a pensioner of Jesus College, Cambridge; but having refused to take the oaths to government, he was obliged to quit the university without a degree, and forced to trust to his abilities for a subsistence. His first employment promised more than it afterwards realized. He accompanied the Earl of Orrery to Flanders in the capacity of private secretary, and returned with his lordship to England in 1705. Being thus left without employment, he became assistant in a school at Headley, in Surrey, and was soon afterwards appointed master of the free grammar-school at Sevenoaks in Kent. In 1710 he was prevailed on to give up the drudgery of teaching for the worse drudgery of political dependence; Lord Bolingbroke, who had persuaded him to take this unwise step, having, with characteristic recklessness, neglected his interest, and left him disappointed and in debt. But not long afterwards he was appointed tutor to Lord Broghill, only son of the Earl of Orrery; and when this engagement expired, he was, on the recommendation of Pope, employed to give private instructions to Mr Craggs, secretary of state, who, feeling his own want of literature, was anxious, with the aid of such an instructor, to supply the deficiencies of his education. His next engagement was with Pope himself. The success of the translation of the Iliad having induced the latter to undertake that of the Odyssey, he, in order to lighten the task, resolved to engage auxiliaries; and, with this view, retaining twelve books for his own share, he distributed the remaining twelve between Broome and Fenton. Of these, according to Johnson and Warton, Fenton translated the first, fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth; though the Earl of Orrery has asserted that he translated double the number of books which Pope has acknowledged. In 1723 his tragedy of Mariamne was brought out, and performed with such success that the author's profits are said to have amounted to nearly a thousand pounds. The poetical merit of this tragedy is considerable; but the diction is too figurative and ornate for a dramatic composition, and accordingly it has not retained its place on the stage. In 1727 Fenton superintended a new edition of Milton's Poems, to which he prefixed a life, of which Johnson has spoken with commendation; and in 1729 he published a splendid edition of Waller, with notes. The latter part of Fenton's life was passed in tranquillity. By the recommendation of Pope, Lady Trumbull appointed him tutor to her son, first at home and afterwards at Cambridge; and when he had acquitted himself of the duties of this office, she still retained him in her family as auditor of her accounts, in which capacity he seems to have enjoyed his ease, and found leisure to pay frequent visits to his literary friends in London. He died at East Hampton, Berkshire, on the 13th of July 1730, and was interred in the parish church, where his tomb has inscribed on it an epitaph written by Pope. Fenton, naturally indolent, was capable of greater things than he performed. His reputation as a poet rests chiefly on his Mariamne, and his share in the translation of the Odyssey, which the readers of poetry have never been able to distinguish from the portion executed by Pope himself; but to his Miscellaneous Poems, published in 1717, he has been indebted for a place amongst the English poets in Dr Johnson's collection. Of his morals and conversation the account is uniform. "He was never named," says Dr Johnson, "but with praise and fondness, as a man in the highest degree amiable and excellent. Such was the character given of him by the Earl of Orrery, his pupil; such is the testimony of Pope; and such were the suffrages of all who could boast of his acquaintance."