Samuel Boyce

Last updated

Samuel Boyce (died 1775) was an English engraver and poet.

Contents

The frontispiece to Boyce's Poems on Several Occasions (1757) Frontispiece to Poems on Several Occcaisions by Samuel Boyce.jpg
The frontispiece to Boyce's Poems on Several Occasions (1757)

Life

Boyce was originally an engraver, and subsequently worked in the South Sea House. He published one play, entitled The Rover, or Happiness at Last, a dramatic pastoral (1752), which was never performed. In its preface, he claimed that this was due to its length, and not to its lack of merit. [1]

In 1757, he published Poems on Several Occasions, which included an ode entitled Glory, addressed to the Duke of Cumberland, and a heroic poem in two cantos, dedicated to David Garrick, called Paris, or the Force of Beauty. The frontispiece, engraved by Boyce himself, was an allegorical scene depicting "Fortune obstructing the Genius of Poetry in its ascent to the Temples of Learning and Fame". [2]

He was a friend of Christopher Smart, and published a poem in praise of Smart's Song to David in the Public Advertiser in July 1763. [3]

He died 21 March 1775. [4]

Works

Notes

  1. "Poetry". The Monthly Review: 316. 1752. Retrieved 7 June 2011.
  2. "Art.III Poems on Several Occasions". The Critical Review: Or, Annals of Literature. 4: 193–5. 1757. Retrieved 7 June 2011.
  3. Rizzo, Betty; Mahon, Robert, eds. (1991). The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart. SIU Press. p. 95. ISBN   9780809316090.
  4. Davenport Adams, W.H. A Book about London: London Streets. London: 1890.
  5. Quoted in Pisani, Michael (2005). Imagining Native America in Music. Yale University Press. pp. 52–3. ISBN   0300130732.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Gray</span> English poet and classical scholar (1716–1771)

Thomas Gray was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Stanley (composer)</span> English composer and organist (1712–1786)

Charles John Stanley was an English composer and organist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charlotte Lennox</span> Scottish writer

Charlotte Lennox, néeRamsay, was a Scottish author and a literary and cultural critic, whose publishing career flourished in London. Best known for her novel The Female Quixote (1752), she was frequently praised for her genius and literary skill. As a result, Sir Joshua Reynolds painted her portrait and she was featured in The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain in 1778. Samuel Johnson declared her superior to all other female writers, and Henry Fielding said that she "excelled Cervantes." Her pioneering study of Shakespeare's source material is still cited and her magazine (1760-1761) is the focus of "The Lady's Museum Project."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Smart</span> English poet (1722–1771)

Christopher Smart was an English poet. He was a major contributor to two popular magazines, The Midwife and The Student, and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Hill (botanist)</span> English author and botanist (1716–1775)

Sir John Hill was an English composer, actor, author and botanist. He contributed to contemporary periodicals and engaged in literary battles with poets, playwrights and scientists. He is remembered for his illustrated botanical compendium The Vegetable System, one of the first works to use the nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus. In recognition of his efforts, he was created a knight of the Order of Vasa in 1774 by Gustav III of Sweden and thereafter called himself Sir John Hill.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

— Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, published this year

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

<i>The Hilliad</i>

The Hilliad was Christopher Smart's mock epic poem written as a literary attack upon John Hill on 1 February 1753. The title is a play on Alexander Pope's The Dunciad with a substitution of Hill's name, which represents Smart's debt to Pope for the form and style of The Hilliad as well as a punning reference to the Iliad. In "Book the First" of The Hilliad, Hillario is seduced by a Sibyl to give up his career as an apothecary and instead becomes a writer. However, his fortune quickly descends with Hillario ultimately turning into the "arch-dunce".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Asylum confinement of Christopher Smart</span> The poets institutional confinement, 1757–1763

The English poet Christopher Smart (1722–1771) was confined to mental asylums from May 1757 until January 1763. Smart was admitted to St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, Upper Moorfields, London, on 6 May 1757. He was taken there by his father-in-law, John Newbery, although he may have been confined in a private madhouse before then. While in St Luke's he wrote Jubilate Agno and A Song to David, the poems considered to be his greatest works. Although many of his contemporaries agreed that Smart was "mad", accounts of his condition and its ramifications varied, and some felt that he had been committed unfairly.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel Boyse</span> Irish poet

Samuel Boyse was an Irish poet and writer who worked for Sir Robert Walpole and whose religious verses in particular were prized and reprinted in his time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel Croxall</span>

Samuel Croxall was an Anglican churchman, writer and translator, particularly noted for his edition of Aesop's Fables.

Elizabeth "Eliza" Ryves was an Irish author, poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and translator.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collective 18th-century biographies of literary women</span>

During the eighteenth century, there were several attempts to describe a "women's literary tradition." This table compares six eighteenth-century collections of notable women: George Ballard's Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain (1752), John Duncombe's The Feminead (1754), the Biographium Faemineum, Mary Scott's The Female Advocate (1775), Richard Polwhele's The Unsex'd Females (1798), and Mary Hay's Female Biography (1803).

References

"Boyce, Samuel"  . Dictionary of National Biography . London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.