Champion, Anthony

, a miscellaneous writer, was the son of Peter Champion, a gentleman of an ancient and respectable family, seated at St. Columb in Cornwall, who Acquired a considerable fortune as a merchant at Leghorn | he was born February 5, 1724-5, at Croydon, in Surrey, and received his first instruction in the Greek and Latin languages at Cheani school in that county; from whence, in 173y, he was removed to Eton, and in February 1742, became a member of the university of Oxford having been placed at St. Mary-hall, under the care of the rev. Walter Harte, a celebrated tutor, who was selected at a later period by the earl of Chesterfield to finish his son Mr. Stanhope’s education in classical literature. After having passed two years at Oxford, he was entered as a student of law at the Middle Temple, where he continued to reside to the day of his decease; and was a bencher of that society, to which he bequeathed one thousand pounds. He served in two parliaments, having been elected in 1754 for the borough of St. Germain’s, and in 1761 for Liskard in Cornwall; but the same great modesty and reserve restrained him from displaying the powers of his very discerning and enlightened mind in that illustrious assembly, which prevented him also from communicating to the world his poetical effusions, a collection of which was published in an elegant volume in 1801, by William Henry lord Lyttelton, who prefixed a biographical article, from which the above account is taken. He died Feb. 22, 1801, beloved and lamented, as his noble friend says, by all who were acquainted with the brightness of his genius, his taste for the finer arts, his various and extensive learning, and the still more valuable qualities of his warm and benevolent heart. From his “Miscellanies in prose and verse, English and Latin,” it is discernible that he was a polite scholar, and had many qualities of a poet, but not unmixed with a love for those disgusting images in which Swift delighted. ¹