John Scott of Amwell

[4] Scott lacked a full or satisfactory education and had only come to a knowledge of poetry through friendship with a bricklayer autodidact, whose daughter Sarah Frogley he eventually married in 1767.

Scott had been making occasional visits to London since 1760 and there made the acquaintance of John Hoole, who introduced him to Dr Johnson.

Though they disagreed politically, Johnson remarked that "he loved Mr Scott" and meant to write his life, although death intervened before he could do so.

These had originated from Scott's dissatisfaction with some of the essays in Johnson’s recent Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets and was meant to supply a corrective view.

Such writing was not to the taste of Dr Johnson who, when Boswell urged that Scott was “a very middle-rate poet, who pleased many readers”, argued that only excellence was admirable.

[15] Particular itemisation is one facet of Scott's style, avoiding the generalised Augustan diction of earlier poets: There is a wide range of literary and geographical reference as well.

[21] In the 21st century it has been set to music by the Quaker composer Ned Rorem as the opening piece in his song cycle "Aftermath" (2001), an immediate pacifist reaction to the vengeful spirit that followed the attacks of 9/11.