Buckden is a village and parish some sixty-one miles from London, and four miles south-west from Huntingdon.
p. [120] Orinda. vide note supra (on p. 7), 'two Orinda's'.
p. [120] No dying Swan. cf. Ovid, Heroides, vii, 1-2:—
Sic, ubi fata vocant, udis abiectus in herbis,
Ad vada Mæandri concinit albus olor.
and Metamorphoseon v. 386-7:—
non illo plura Caystros
Carmina cycnorum labentibus audit in undis.
p. [121] J. Adams. John Adams was a member, and afterwards a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He proceeded B.A. 1682, M.A. 1686, and is mentioned as a Professor of Theology, whence we infer that he took Orders. In 1712 he was 'Collegii Regalis Praepositus'. He prefixed a copy of complimentary verses (1 January, 1682), to Creech's Lucretius, and was also a contributor to Dryden's Miscellany.
John Adams, the celebrated topographer, who in 1680 laboriously drew up the Index Villaris, a gazetteer dedicated to Charles II, was a barrister of the Inner Temple, and must be carefully distinguished from the Cambridge litterateur.
p. [123] T. C. i.e. Thomas Creech, who was born at Blandford, Dorset, 1659. In Lent Term, 1675, he was admitted as a commoner at Wadham College, Oxford. Having studied hard he graduated M.A. 13 June, 1683 (B.D. 18 March, 1696), and was elected a Fellow of All Souls, 1 November, 1683. For two years (1694-6) he was headmaster of Sherborne, and then returned to Oxford. Melancholia, however, grew upon him, and after accepting the college living of Welwyn (where he never resided) he committed suicide, his body being discovered (June, 1700), in a garret in his lodging at the house of an apothecary named Ives. Creech's translation of Lucretius was printed at Oxford, 1682. It is of value, and Munro in his edition of the poet speaks of his predecessor as 'a man of sound sense and good taste', no mean praise from so great a scholar.