THE LIFE OF SIR JOHN BEAUMONT. BY MR. CHALMERS. Of this author we have only a very short notice in the last edition of the Biographia Britannica, augmented, however, by the successful researches of Mr. Nichols in his history of Leicestershire, a work to which we shall have occasion to acknowledge yet more substantial obligations, in the life of the dramatic poet of this family. Sir John Beaumont was the son of Francis Beaumont, one of the judges of the Common Pleas in the reign of queen Elizabeth, and brother of Francis, the dramatic colleague of Fletcher. He was born in 1582 at Grace-dieu, the family seat, in Leicestershire, and admitted a gentleman commoner of Broadgate's Hall (now Pembroke College) Oxford, the beginning of Lent Term, 1596. After three years' study here, during which he seems to have attached himself most to the poetical classics, he became a member of one of the inns of court, but soon quitted that situation, and returned to Leicestershire, where he married Elizabeth, daughter of John Fortescue, esq. In 1626, king Charles conferred on him the dignity of a baronet, which sir John survived only two years, dying in the winter of 1628. He is said by Anthony Wood to have been buried at Grace-dieu: but this is a mistake for Belton, as the priory church was not then existing. The cause of his death is obscurely hinted at in the following lines by Drayton : Thy care for that, which was not worth thy breath, a a What these lines imply it is not easy to conjecture. Sir John died at the age of forty-six, almost in the prime of life, and his poetical attempts were the amusement of his young days, which he had relinquished for more serious studies. He had seven sons and four daughters. Of his sons the most noticeable were John, bis successor, the editor of his father's poems, and himself a minor poet: Francis, the author of some verses on his father's poems, who became afterwards a Jesuit: Gervase, who died at seven years old, and was lamented by his father in some very pathetic |