Dupre De St. Maur, Nicholas Francis

, master of the accounts at Paris, was born there in 1696, and died in that capital Dec. 1, 1774. He was admitted of the French academy in 1733, and was much esteemed as a man of general knowledge and taste. He attempted to give his countrymen an idea of English poetry, by a translation into French of Milton’s Paradise Lost, in 4 vols. 12mo, containing also the Paradise Regained, translated by a Jesuit, with Addison’s remarks on the former. This version, in which great liberties are taken with the original, is written in an animated and florid style. The last edition of the Diet. Hist, however, robs him of the whole merit of | this translation, and ascribes it to Boismorand, whose name was not so good a passport to fame as that of Dupre. He wrote also, an “Essay on the Coins of France,” 1746, 4to, a work abounding in curious disquisition, and justly esteemed “Inquiries concerning the value of Monies, and the price of Grain,” 1761, 12mo and “The Table of the duration of Human Life,” in the Natural History of M. de Buffon. The author, who had cultivated in his youth the flowers of imagination, devoted his old age to studies relative to rural oeconomy, to agriculture, and other sciences of importance to mankind. ¹