Higgons, Bevil

, younger son of sir Thomas (and first cousin to the late earl of Granville), by Bridget his | second wife, was born in 1670, and became a commoner of St. John’s college, Oxford, in Lent term 1686; and went afterwards to Cambridge, and then to the Middle Temple. Wood enumerates five of his poems. He wrote some others and was the author of a tragedy, entitled “The Generous Conqueror, or the Timely Discovery,” acted at Drury-lane, and printed in 1702, 4to. He was a steady adherent to the cause of the exiled family; and accompanied king James into France, where he mairrtained his wit and good-humour undepressed by his misfortunes. He died in March 1735. He published a poem “on the Peace of Utrecht;” and on the publication of bishop Burnet’s “History of his own Times,” he wrote some strictures on it, in a volume entitled “Historical and Critical Remarks,” the second edition of which was printed in 1727, 8vo; and, in the same year, published “A short View of the English History, with Reflections, political, historical, civil, physical, and moral on the reigns of the kings their characters, and manners their successions to the throne, and other remarkable incidents to the Revolution 1688. Drawn from authentic Memoirs and Mss.” “These papers,” he tells us in his preface, “lay covered with dust 36 years, till every person concerned in the transactions mentioned were removed from the stage.1

1

Ath. Ox. Tol. II. Nichols’s Poems.