JOHN

See also:

• HUGHES, DAVID EDWARD (1831-1900)
• HUGHES, HUGH PRICE (1847-19o2)
• JOHN HUGHES (1677-1720)
• HUGHES, JOHN (1797-1864)
• HUGHES, SIR EDWARD (c. 1720-1794)
• HUGHES, THOMAS
• HUGHES, THOMAS (1822-1896)

HUGHES (1677-1720)  , English poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Marlborough, Wiltshire, on the 29th of January 1677 . His father was a clerk in a city office, and his grandfather was ejected from the living of Marlborough in 1662 for his Nonconformist opinions . Hughes was educated at a dissenting academy in London, where Isaac Watts was among his fellow scholars . He became a clerk in the Ordnance Office, and served on several commissions for the purchase of land for the royal dockyards . In 1717 Lord Chancellor Cowper made him secretary to the commissions of the peace in the court of chancery . He died on the night of the production of his most celebrated work, The Siege of Damascus, the 17th of February 1720 . His poems include occasional pieces in honour of William III., imitations of Horace, and a translation of the tenth book of the Pharsalia of Lucan . He was an amateur of the violin, and played in the concerts of Thomas Britton, the " musical small-coal man." He wrote some of the libretti of the cantatas (2 vols., 1712) set to music by Dr John Christopher Pepusch . To these he prefixed an essay advocating the claims of English libretti, and insisting on the value of recitative . Others of his pieces were set to music by Ernest Galliard and by Handel . In the masque of Apollo and Daphne (1716) he was associated with Pepusch, and in his opera of Calypso and Telemachus (1712) with John E . Galliard .

He was a contributor to the Taller, the Spectator and the

Guardian, and he collaborated with Sir Richard Blackmore in a series of essays entitled The Lay Monastery (1713-1714) . He persuaded Joseph Addison to stage Cato . Addison had requested Hughes to write the last act, but eventually completed the play himself . He wrote a version of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise . . . (1714) chiefly from the French translation printed at the Hague in 1693, which went through several editions, and is notable as the basis of Pope's " Eloisa to Abelard " (1717) . He also made translations from Nloliere, Fontenelle and the Abbe Vertot, and in 1715 edited The Works of Edmund Spenser . . . (another edition, 1750) . His last work, the tragedy of The Siege of Damascus, is his best . It remained on the list of acting plays for a long time, and is to be found in various collected editions of British drama . His Poems on Several Occasions, with some Select Essays in Prose were edited with a memoir in 1735, by William Duncombe, who had married his sister Elizabeth .

See also Letters by several eminent persons (2 vols., 1772) and The

Correspondence of John Hughes, Esq . . and Several of his Friends . (2 vols., 1773), with some additional poems . There is a lohg and eulogistic account of Hughes, with some letters, in the Biographia Britannica .