JOHN, the English translator of Plutarch's Lives, was born in 1735 at Kirkby-Steven, in Westmoreland. He was educated first at Winton, and afterwards at Appleby; but being too poor to go directly to the university, he devoted himself to private teaching, took orders, and began to dabble in literature. In 1760 he entered Clare Hall, Cambridge, as a ten-year man, but does not seem to have taken his degree. He was at this time acting as private tutor in the family of a Lincolnshire gentleman, with whose daughter he fell in love. His suit was rejected, and he betook himself to London, where he became curate of St John's, Clerkenwell, and wrote largely for the periodical press. One of his best pieces was his poem entitled Genius and Valour, in which he defended the Scottish nation against the fierce invective of Churchill's Prophecy of Fame. The University of Edinburgh, by the advice of Robertson the historian, acknowledged his goodwill with the degree of D.D. In the following year, 1767, he married the lady by whom he had been rejected some time before. Her friends were rich, and bought for him the living of Blagden, in Somersetshire; but in less than a year after her marriage his wife died in childbirth. He felt her loss very keenly. Retiring to Folkestone, in Kent, he joined his brother, perpetual curate of that place. With his assistance he began the translation of Plutarch, which, when published in 1771, made his name widely known, and still preserves it from oblivion. In 1772 he married again, and four years later had the misfortune to lose his second wife from the same cause as the first. He was a man of strong domestic sympathies, and this double calamity quite unhinged his mind. To escape from his griefs, he plunged headlong into the social excitements, of which he had been always, though moderately fond. He died in 1779, in the forty-fifth year of his age. For the details of his life we are chiefly indebted to a memoir of him by his son, prefixed to a posthumous edition of his poems.

Langhorne was a very voluminous writer. His principal works, besides his Plutarch, are his Letters on Religious Retirement, dedicated to Warburton, 8vo, 1762; Poetical Works, 2 vols., 1776, and two volumes of Sermons. He also wrote largely for the press, especially for the Monthly Review, to which he contributed many essays and short Langland's tales. His translation of Plutarch is correct and literal, but very far from being what a translation of Plutarch ought to be. His poetical pieces never rise above neatness and good taste, but are easy and melodious, and sometimes strike chords of gentle pathos. His prose runs on smoothly and clearly, with no great originality or depth of thought. The manifest tendency to rhetoric is kept within bounds by the same good taste which marks his poetry.