WILLIAM, an English poet, born in the year 1725, was the son of a clergyman who held the living of Hull. He was educated at Cambridge, and was admitted a fellow of Pembroke College in 1747. He became rector of Aston in Yorkshire, and chaplain to his Majesty; and was subsequently made precentor and canon residentiary of the cathedral of York. His monody to the memory of Pope; and Issa, an elegy; added to his fame, which was still further increased by his dramatic poems of *Elfrieda* in 1752, and *Caractacus* in 1759, written after the manner of the ancients. He published a small collection of odes in 1756, intended as an imitation of his friend Gray, which afforded Colman and Lloyd effective subjects for clever parodies. In 1763 he produced some elegies marked by simplicity of language and noble sentiment. In point of morality he may justly be considered as the purest of poets, and one of the warmest friends of civil liberty. The first book of his *English Garden* made its appearance in 1772, being a dull didactic poem in blank verse, of which the fourth and last book was printed in the year 1781. In 1775 he published the poems of Gray, to which he prefixed memoirs of his life and writings; and in 1783 he produced an elegant poetical translation of Dufrénoy's Latin poem on the art of painting; besides An Historical and Critical Essay on English Church Music. An additional volume of his poems was given to the world in 1797, consisting of miscellaneous pieces, the revised productions of his youth, and the effusions of his old age. He died in April 1797, at the age of seventy-two. A tablet has been placed to his memory in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.