John Durant Breval

He started his literary career under the alias of Joseph Gay and later gained popularity as a travel writer while using his own name after 37 editions of his Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, Relating Chiefly to their Antiquities and History were published in England between 1726 and 1738.

[3] Sir John Bramston, in his Autobiography (1845), describes the elder Breval in 1672 as "formerly a priest of the Romish church, and of the companie of those in Somerset House, but now a convert to the protestant religion and a preacher at the Savoy".

[4] This refers to the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy built by Inigo Jones where Henrietta Maria of France, wife of King Charles I, could exercise her Roman Catholic religion.

The husband brought an action against Breval, who was held to bail for the assault, but, conceiving that there was an informality in the proceedings against him, did not appear at the assizes, and was outlawed.

His friends said that the alleged offense rested on mere rumor and suspicion, and that the expelled fellow would have good grounds for an action against the college.

Then, what John Bowyer Nichols calls 'his exquisite pencil and genteel behaviour,' as well as his skill in acquiring languages, attracted the attention of Marlborough.

[2] The Peace of Utrecht closed the war in 1713, and a few years after we find Breval busily writing for the London booksellers, chiefly under the name of Joseph Gay.

1738), though we have a somewhat elaborate description of Milan, and an account of 'a Milanese Lady of great Beauty, who bequeathed her Skeleton to the Publick as a memento mori.'

At this time (1717) Breval, who was writing a good deal for Edmund Curll, wrote for him, under the pseudonym of 'Joseph Gay,' a satire called The Confederates,[7] in which 'the late famous comedy' and its three authors were unsparingly ridiculed.

In the notes (1729) affixed to the first passage Pope says that some account must be given of Breval owing to his obscurity, and declares that Curll put 'Joseph Gay' on such pamphlets that they might pass for Mr.

In the latter period of his life he wrote 'The Harlot's Progress,' an illustrated poem in six cantos, suggested by Hogarth's well-known prints, and said by Ambrose Philips, in a prefatory letter, to be 'a true Key and lively Explanation of the Painter's Hieroglyphicks' (1732); The History of the most Illustrious House of Nassau, with regard to that branch of it more particularly that came into the succession of Orange (1734) ; The Rape of Helen, a mock opera (acted at Covent Garden), (1737).