[Footnote 1: John Hughes is the author of these two letters, and,
Chalmers thinks, also of the letters signed R. B. in Nos. 33 and 53. He
was in 1711 thirty-two years old. John Hughes, the son of a citizen of
London, was born at Marlborough, educated at the private school of a
Dissenting minister, where he had Isaac Watts for schoolfellow, delicate
of health, zealous for poetry and music, and provided for by having
obtained, early in life, a situation in the Ordnance Office. He died of
consumption at the age of 40, February 17, 1719-20, on the night of the
first production of his Tragedy of 'The Siege of Damascus'. Verse of his
was in his lifetime set to music by Purcell and Handel. In 1712 an opera
of 'Calypso and Telemachus', to which Hughes wrote the words, was
produced with success at the Haymarket. In translations, in original
verse, and especially in prose, he merited the pleasant little
reputation that he earned; but his means were small until, not two years
before his death, Lord Cowper gave him the well-paid office of Secretary
to the Commissioners of the Peace. Steele has drawn the character of his
friend Hughes as that of a religious man exempt from every sensual vice,
an invalid who could take pleasure in seeing the innocent happiness of
the healthy, who was never peevish or sour, and who employed his
intervals of ease in drawing and designing, or in music and poetry.]
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