Ritson, Isaac

, a young man of very considerable literary talents, was a native of Emont- bridge, near Penritb, and was born in 1761. At the age of sixteen, he |

began to teach school with credit to himself, and advantage to his pupils. After superintending a school for about four years, he relinquished the employment, and repaired to Edinburgh, where he studied medicine; and he maintained himself by writing medical theses for such of his fellow students as were too indolent, or too illiterate, to write for themselves. From Edinburgh he went to London, where he attended on the hospitals, and on lectures, and where he also supported himself by his literary exertions. In London he took a few private pupils, and was engaged for some time in writing the medical articles in the Monthly Review. Like Chatterton, however, whom in many particulars Ritson greatly resembled, he had to lament the neglect of the world, and after a short and irregular life in London, he died of a few weeks illness, at Islington, in 1789, and in the twenty-seventh year of his age.

Mr. Ritson published an excellent translation of Homer’s “Hymn to Venus,” 4to, which was well received by the public, and wrote one equally masterly of Hesiod’s “Theogony,” which, it is much to be regretted, was never published, and is now entirely lost. He wrote also “Essays on Moral and Philosophical Subjects,” which were never published; the preface to Clarke’s “Survey of the Lakes,” very ably executed; and several other pieces. He was a warm admirer of Shakspeare, and he frequently talked of producing a dramatic work on the Grecian model, similar in its kind to Mason’s Elfrida and Caractacus. ¹