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
, 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.