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44 Sir John Horsford d D When he was twenty years old, John Horsford (1751–1817) abruptly gave up a fellowship at Oxford and enlisted as “John Rover” in the Bengal Artillery. Within weeks he was aboard the DukeofGrafton, bound for India. Why Horsford abandoned Oxford is not entirely clear, though he did claim that the pursuit of poetry “ruined” him. His biographer H. M. Chichester reported that he was disinclined to “enter the church as his friends desired” (DNB Archive, ODNB). I take this to mean that his family expected him to take holy orders. Whatever the case, Horsford arrived in India in an anomalous position. Educated men of good family were expected to 0nd, or to have purchased for them, commissions in the army. Most common soldiers were scarcely literate, much less educated, as Horsford had been, at two of the most prominent educational institutions in England: the Merchant Taylor’s School and St. John’s College, Oxford. Despite his assumed name, his disguise could scarcely have been complete , but Horsford served for six years as an enlisted man in the artillery, a position that at that time was highly unusual for a gentleman. The story goes that his commanding o2cer, alerted by inquiries after him, discovered his true identity when Horsford corrected a Greek quotation in some papers he was copying. The colonel called him by name, and the soldier answered to his true identity. Following this episode, Horsford was appointed a cadet in the commissioned corps. Appointments from the enlisted ranks to the commissioned corps were extremely rare, but Horsford’s appointment relected his family’s status, his education , and his exemplary service in the enlisted ranks. Horsford’s service as an enlisted man made him an efective o2cer, and over a long career he rose through the ranks. At his death of heart failure in 1817, he was a major general on the staf of the Grand Army, having served forty-0ve years with distinction. Francis Stubbs, in a history of the Bengal Artillery, praised Horsford as a man whose “habits of system and application” and whose “perfect integrity” allied with temperance made him an ideal o2cer. In addition to poetry and contributions to the Asiatic Society, Horsford wrote extensively about military matters, and his memoranda led, after his death, to the successful reorganization of the Bengal Artillery. Despite a long career on active duty, Horsford published two books of poetry in Calcutta: A Collection of Poems, Written in the East Indies (1797) and Poems in Three Parts Sir John Horsford D 45 (1800). His poems were lanked by a considerable subscriber list, as Horsford managed to pre-sell 170 copies of his 0rst volume and 196 of the second. Poems in Three Parts is cataloged in Worldcat and in the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online database as written by three authors: Sir William Jones, John Hawkesworth , and John Horsford. This attribution, however, is misleading, for part one, as I detail below, consists of facing page translations into English of Jones’s Latin poems by an author writing after Jones’s death; the author of the translations is anonymous, but his style is coherent with Horsford’s, as is the esteem in which the translator holds Sir William. The second section of the volume is attributed by bibliographers to Hawkesworth, but I can 0nd no warrant for this claim, and indeed the poem “Literary Characteristicks of the Most Distinguished Members of the Asiatic Society” was published under a diferent pseudonym, “John Collegins Esq.,” in the Asiatic Annual Register, 1801 (London, 1802): 118. The conclusion of the poem includes a paean to the Howrah Orphanage, from which the author claims to have taken two daughters, a claim identical to that made by J— H— [John Horsford] in the third section of Poems in Three Parts, which is signed with his own initials. Internal evidence, then, these examples among others, makes for a strong claim that Horsford was the author of all three parts of this volume, modestly saving the expanded collection of his own verse for the end of the volume. The many fulsome dedications of his poems, the occasional nature of his verse, his frequent address to his superiors, and his footnotes were eforts to establish a context for belles lettres among o2cers and East India Company servants in Calcutta and the Bengal Presidency. Many of these company employees and o2cers would have shared his education in the Greek and Latin classics; a very few would...

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