Pitt, Christopher

(1699-1748)

   Born at Blandford, Dorset, the son of a doctor, he was educated at Winchester College and graduated M.A. from New College, Oxford, in 1724. He was rector at Pimperne in Dorset from 1722 until he died; he was buried in Blandford Church. The literary influence of the family is strong. His father contributed the Plague of Athens to the well-known translation of Lucretius by Thomas Creech (1682) (see entry) and his elder brother, Robert, translated into Latin five books of Milton's Paradise Lost. His Poem on the Death of the late Earl of Stanhope, Humbly inscribed to the Countess of Stanhope was published in 1721 while he was still an undergraduate. Some of his other publications: Vida's Art of Poetry, 1725 (a verse translation of the De Arte Poetica of Marcus Hieronymus Vida, bishop of Alba, first published at Paris in 1534). Poems and translations, 1727. The Æneid of Virgil, 1753. Poems, 1756. Some of his poems: "On a Shadow," "On the Death of a Young Gentleman," "On the Masquerades," "The 8th Psalm Translated," "The Fable of the Young Man and His Cat."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. EighteenthCentury English Verse. Dennis Davison, ed. Penguin Books, 1988. English Poetry: A Poetic Record, from Chaucer to Yeats. David Hopkins, ed. Routledge, 1990. Gentleman's Magazine (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/journals/srchgm.htm). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, 1779-1781 (http://www2.hn.psu.edu/Faculty/KKemmerer/poets/preface.htm). Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Colum314 bia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org).