various, so exquisite, and perfectly delightful, that he who culls flowers in a garden so replenished with nature’s productions, must be well acquainted with her form, and able to delineate her beauties.  In this attempt Creech failed, and a shade was thrown over his reputation, which continued to obscure it to the end of his life.  It is from this circumstance alleged, that Mr. Creech contracted a melancholy, and moroseness of temper, which occasioned the disinclination of many towards him, and threw him into habits of recluseness, and discontent.  To this some writers likewise impute the rash attempt on his own life, which he perpetrated at Oxford, in 1701.  This act of suicide could not be occasioned by want, for Mr. Jacob tells us, that just before that accident, he had been presented by the college to the living of Welling in Hertfordshire.  Mr. Barnard in his Nouvelles de la Republiques de Lettres, assigns another cause besides the diminution of his fame, which might occasion this disastrous fate.  Mr. Creech, though a melancholy man, was yet subject to the passion of love.  It happened that he fixed his affections on a lady who had either previously engaged hers, or who could not bestow them upon him; this disappointment, which was a wound to his pride, so affected his mind, that, unable any longer to support a load of misery, he hanged himself in his own chamber.  Which ever of these causes induced him, the event was melancholy, and not a little heightened by his being a clergyman, in whose heart religion should have taken deeper root, and maintained a more salutary influence, than to suffer him thus to stain his laurels with his own blood.

Mr. Creech’s works, besides his Lucretius already mentioned, are chiefly these,

The Second Elegy of Ovid’s First Book of Elegies.  The 6th, 7th, 8th, and 12th Elegies of Ovid’s Second Book of Elegies.  The 2d and 3d Eclogue of Virgil.  The Story of Lucretia, from Ovid de Fastis.  B. ii.  The Odes, Satires, and Epistles of Horace already mentioned, dedicated to John Dryden, esq; who is said to have held it in great contempt, which gave such a shock to Mr. Creech’s pride.  The author in his preface to this translation has informed us, that he had not an ear capable of distinguishing one note in music, which, were there no other, was a sufficient objection against his attempting the most musical poet in any language.

The same year he published his Translation of the Idylliums of Theocritus, with Rapin’s Discourse on Pastorals, as also the Life of Phelopidas, from the Latin of Cornelius Nepos.

In Dryden’s Translation of Juvenal and Persius, Mr. Creech did the 13th Satire of Juvenal, and subjoined Notes.  He also translated into English, the verses before Mr. Quintenay’s Compleat Gardiner.  The Life of Solon, from the Greek of Plutarch.  Laconic Apophthegms, or Remarkable Sayings of the Spartans, printed in the first Volume of Plutarch’s Morals.  A Discourse concerning Socrates’s Daemon.  The two First Books of the Symposiacs.