William Lipscomb (writer)

For some years he was private tutor and subsequently chaplain to Henry Vane, the future Earl of Darlington, at Raby Castle.

By his marriage in 1780 with Margaret, second daughter of Francis Cooke, cashier of the navy, he had a large family of whom ten children survived him.

[4] The versions from the Italian (lyrics rather than ‘sonnets’) included in that collection, equally with some from Horace’s Latin, appearing in his later Poems and Translations (London 1830),[5] owe much to contemporary poetic conventions.

However, another of his projects, the translation of the fables of Jean Pierre Claris de Florian, had the distinction of being the first and only sizeable English selection from that author; two others that followed later in the 19th century were published in Canada and the United States.

Mixed reviews greeted Lipscomb’s next major publication, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer completed in a Modern Version (1795).