THE

LIFE OF HUGHES.

BY DR. JOHNSON.

JOHN HUGHES, the son of a citizen in London, and of Anne Burgess, of an ancient family in Wiltshire, was born at Marlborough, July 29, 1677. educated at a private school; and though his advances in literature are, in the Biographia, very ostentatiously displayed, the name of his master is somewhat ungratefully concealed'.

At nineteen he drew the plan of a tragedy: and paraphrased, rather too profusely, the ode of Horace which begins Integer vitæ. To poetry he added the science of music, in which he seems to have attained considerable skill, together with the practice of design, or rudiments of painting.

His studies did not withdraw him wholly from business, nor did business hinder him from study. He had a place in the office of ordnance; and was secretary to several commissions for purchasing lands necessary to secure the royal docks at Chatham and Portsmouth; yet found time to acquaint himself with modern languages.

In 1697 he published a poem on the Peace of Ryswick: and in 1699 another piece, called The Court of Neptune, on the return of king William, which he addressed to Mr. Montague, the general patron of the followers of the Muses. The same year he produced a song on the duke of Gloucester's birth-day.

He did not confine himself to poetry, but cultivated other kinds of writing with' great success; and about this time showed his knowledge of human nature by an Essay on the Pleasure of being deceived. In 1702 he published, on the death of king William, a Pindaric ode, called The House of Nassau; and wrote another paraphrase on the Otium Divos of Horace.

In 1703 his ode on Music was performed at Stationer's Hall; and he wrote afterwards six cantatas, which were set to music by the greatest master of that time, and seemned intended to oppose or exclude the Italian opera, an exotic and irrational entertainment, which has been always combated, and always has prevailed.

He was educated in a dissenting academy, of which the Rev. Mr. Thomas Rowe was tutor; and was a fellow student there with Dr. Isaac Watts, Mr. Samuel Say, and other persons of eminence In the Hora Lyrice of Dr. Watts is a poem to the memory of Mr. Rowe, H.