JOHN, D.D., an English divine and miscellaneous writer, whose learning and literary accomplishments have been as unjustly overlooked by posterity as they were ill-rewarded in his own day, was born at London in 1698. His father, a French Protestant of Brittany, had come to England in quest of that religious freedom which was crushed in France when the edict of Nantes was revoked. Educated at the Charter House, he passed thence, in due course, to Jesus College, Cambridge; took his first degree in 1719; was soon after made a fellow of his college; and, in 1722, graduated as M.A. About this time he published, under the title of Lusus Poetici, a small volume of Latin poems, which were greatly admired, and are still fairly entitled to rank high among modern efforts of the kind. His merits were rewarded by his college with a living in the country; but after his marriage he fixed his abode in London, where he became known as a highly popular and useful minister. The sermons which he wrote and published during this period are quite memorable for their acuteness of thought and racy freshness of style. Retiring for a time to Eastwell in Kent, to the living of which he had been presented by the Earl of Winchester, he was again drawn to London, where, in 1731, he was made rector of St Dunstan's-in-the-East, by his friend Archbishop Herring. Four years later the same influence procured for him the degree of D.D. In 1762 his friend Dr Osbaldeston, promoted in that year to the bishopric of London, made Jortin his domestic chaplain, and besides the living of Kensington, obtained for him a prebendal stall in St Paul's. On being made, in 1764, archdeacon of London, Jortin declined various promotions that were afterwards put in his gift. Fixing his residence at Kensington, he remained there till his death, September 5, 1770, and was buried in the new churchyard of that place.

Jortin's most important works were his Miscellaneous Observations upon Authors, Ancient and Modern; Remarks upon Ecclesiastical History; and a Life of Erasmus. Besides these, however, he wrote many miscellaneous criticisms,—such as those on Spenser, Milton, Tillotson, Cardinal Pole, Seneca, and others. All these works display a great amount of curious learning, besides a singular acuteness of thought, expressed in terse, and often forcibly eloquent language. A play of gentle satire gives a piquancy and zest to them that keeps up and heightens the interest. The Life of Erasmus is based on that by Le Clerc in the Bibliothèque Choise, and embodies a mass of notes and digressions on the literary and ecclesiastical history of that period. Though it can hardly be called a finished life of Erasmus, it affords a mine of rich material, from which a life worthy of the man might be constructed.