John, an industrious translator, was born about the close of the seventeenth century. At the school of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, and at Christ's Hospital, he acquired a knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Having entered an accountant's office, his leisure hours were devoted to the cultivation of the literature of France, Spain, and Italy. He published metrical versions of some of the works of Molière, Corneille, Racine, Boileau, and Tasso; and prose translations of Fenelon On Learning, The Port-Royal Logic, Rabelais' works, Don Quixote, Vertot's Rerotations of the Roman Republic, and a Life of Veronica. The vanity of the translator has preserved his name longer than the merit of his translations. The conceited author was exalted to a place among the immortal dunces of Pope; he retaliated by inviting the public, in an advertisement in the Weekly Medley of 1729, to judge between his genius and that of the great poet; Pope replied by inserting the absurd advertisement into the notes of a succeeding edition of the Dunciad; and the translator thus acquired a notoriety, which still lives. He died in 1743.