Of innocence and inward peace;
Untainted by the guilty bribe;
Uncursed amid the harpy tribe;
No orphan's cry to wound my ear;
My honour and my conscience clear;
Thus may I calmly meet my end,
Thus to the grave in peace descend.
JOHN SCOTT.
This poet is generally known as 'Scott of Amwell.' This arises from the
fact that his father, a draper in Southwark, where John was born in
1730, retired ten years afterwards to Amwell. He had never been
inoculated with the small-pox, and such was his dread of the disease,
and that of his family, that for twenty years, although within twenty
miles of London, he never visited it. His parents, who belonged to the
amiable sect of Quakers, sent him to a day-school at Ware, but that too
he left upon the first alarm of infection. At seventeen, although his
education was much neglected, he began to relish reading, and was
materially assisted in his studies by a neighbour of the name of
Frogley, a master bricklayer, who, though somewhat illiterate, admired
poetry. Scott sent his first essays to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, and
in his thirtieth year published four elegies, which met with a kind
reception, although Dr Johnson said only of them, 'They are very well,
but such as twenty people might write.
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