[2][3] As reader to the Temple, to which he was chosen soon afterwards, he won the favour of the master, Bishop Sherlock, who in 1744 presented him to the vicarage of Bedminster, near Bristol, with the chapels of St. Mary Redcliffe, St. Thomas, and Abbot's Leigh annexed.
He published an Historical Dictionary of all Religions from the Creation of the World to the Present Times (1742), a huge work in two volumes folio; he translated Voltaire's Temple of Taste and part of Pierre Bayle's Dictionary; vindicated orthodox Christianity against Matthew Tindal; converted a Roman Catholic book (Dorrel on the Epistles and Gospels) to Protestant uses; edited John Dryden; wrote in defence of the immortality of the soul; and contributed the lives marked 'T' in the original edition of the Biographia Britannica.
who sat himself down to study the Spanish language, and in a few months acquired, as was pretended, sufficient knowledge thereof to give to the world a translation of "Don Quixote" in the true spirit of the original, and to which is prefixed the name of Jarvis.
[2]Broughton, a lover of music, knew Handel, and supplied words for some of his compositions,[2] including a libretto based on Sophocles' Women of Trachis and the ninth book of Ovid's Metamophises for the drama Hercules,[4] first performed at the Haymarket in 1745.
[2] Handel's biographer, Paul Henry Lang, praises Broughton's libretto for its "good theatrical sense" and the way in which it peels away any extraneous elements of the narrative to concentrate on the central drama of jealousy.