John Hughes is the author of these two letters, and, Chalmers thinks, also of the letters signed R. B. in Nos.
and
. 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