Fevre, John Baptist Le

, of Villebrune, where he was born in 1732, was a man of considerable classical learning, and the author of many useful translations into the French language. Of his personal history we are only told, that he was a doctor of medicine, professor of oriental languages in the French college, one of the forty members of the French academy, and keeper of the national library, in which he succeeded Chamfort. He was not much attached to the principles which occasioned the French revolution, and was proscribed by the French | directory for having written a pamphlet in which he maintained that France ought to be governed by a single chief. After residing occasionally in several places, he was made professor of natural history at la Cbarente; and when the central school, as it was called, was shut up, he taught mathematics and humanity in the college. The iast ten yearsof his life were spent at Angouleme, where he died Oct. 7, 1809. His character was lively, and his temper sometimes impetuous and unguarded, which made him many enemies in the literary world. He was, however, a man of indefatigable study, and was a master of fourteen languages ancient and modern. His reading was most extensive, but not well digested, and such was his love of variety, that he seldom adhered to any one subject long enough to produce a work in which it was completely discussed. He was, however, a valuable assistant to scholars employed on any arduous undertaking; and among others, is said to have contributed to the two editions of Strabo lately printed at Utrecht and Oxford, by examining manuscripts for the editors. Among his translations are, a valuable one of Athenreus, and the only one France can boast of since that of the abbd Marolles fell into disrepute. He translated also Hippocrates’ s Aphorisms; Epictetus Cebes’s Table; “Silius Italicus,” of whom also he published an edition of the original, in 1781, containing various readings from four Mss. and from Laver’s edition of 1471, never before collated by any editor. Yet in this he is sometimes rash in his conjectures, and pettishly intemperate in noticing his predecessors. Le Fevre’s other translations are, the “Memoirs of Ulloa,” and “Cervantes’s Tales,” from the Spanish “Carli’s American Letters” from the Italian Zimmerman “On Experience,” and on the “Epidemic Dysentery,” &c. from the German “Rosen’s treatise on Infants,” from the Swedish and the works of Armstrong and Underwood on the same subject, from the English. He published some other works relative to the arts, sciences, and politics, the titles of which are not given in our authority; and left complete, or nearly so, a translation of Aretseas, which he undertook at the request of the School of health of Paris. ¹