WILLIAM, an English poet, said by Johnson to have been born in 1692, but from a note furnished by Johnson's latest editor, Cunningham, it would appear that he was born as early as 1677, at Edstone, a country seat of his family in Warwickshire. He was educated at Westminster School, and at New College, Oxford. He gave no great proofs of genius while he was at College, but on leaving it he went to reside at the family mansion, where he cultivated poetry, sought pleasure as a sportsman, was hospitable, was a justice of the peace, and, in short, was generally esteemed an easy, careless, cultivated country gentleman. Somerville inherited an estate worth L1500 a-year, out of which he allowed his mother L600, but he was too heedless of economy, and perhaps a little too much addicted to the pleasures of the table, so that in his later years he became involved in debt, from which he was only relieved by death on the 19th of July 1742. Shenstone, the poet, says of him, that he was "forced to drink himself into pains of the body, in order to get rid of the pains of the mind." He was buried at Wotton, near Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire.

Somerville tried many kinds of poetry; but his best success is attained in his poem of the Chase, 1735, which is written in blank verse, with sufficient knowledge of his subject, and with very considerable acquaintance with the requirements of the species of verse which he had selected. He has done all that transition and variety could easily effect to interest the common reader, but the versification frequently drags heavily, and the poem only escapes dulness by the novelty of its passing events, and by the efforts at originality which the writer so obviously puts forth. He wrote, besides other poems, the Two Springs, 1725; Hobbinoel, or the Rural Games, 1740; and Field Sports, 1742. His poetical excellence may be fitly summed up in the words of Johnson, "he writes very well for a gentleman."