Grainger, James

(?1721-1766)

   He was born in Dunse, Berwickshire, the son of an excise man who lost his lands in Cumberland for supporting the abortive Stuart uprising of 1715. Through the good offices of his half-brother, James studied medicine at Edinburgh University, then became an army surgeon and saw service in the 1745 rebellion and in Holland 1746-1748. After the 1748 peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, he returned to Scotland and graduated M.D. at Edinburgh in 1753. He settled in London and between 1756 and 1758 he wrote about poetry and drama in the Monthly Review. He also published Essays Physical and Literary (1756). In 1758 he translated Leander to Hero and Hero to Leander from Ovid's Epistles. In 1759 he left on a four year tour of the West Indies with John Bourryau, a former pupil and heir to property in the West Indies, where he practiced as a doctor. His main poetical work of that period is the mock heroic poem "Sugar Cane." He died at St. Christopher (St. Kitts and Nevis) of West Indian fever. Some of his poems: "Bryan and Pereene," "Elegies [Tibullus]," "Solitude: An Ode," "The Fate of Capua," "The Poems of Sulpicia [Tibullus]."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. EighteenthCentury English Verse. Dennis Davison, ed. Penguin Books, 1988. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation. Adrian Poole, and Jeremy Maule, ed. 1995. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Paula Burnett, ed. Penguin Books, 1986. The Works of Tibullus. Suttaby, Evance, and Fox, 1812.