Cambridge, Richard Owen

▪ English author

born Feb. 14, 1717, London, Eng.

died Sept. 17, 1802, Twickenham, Middlesex [now Greater London]

      English poet and essayist and author of the Scribleriad.

      Educated at Eton College and at St. John's College, Oxford, the young Cambridge went into residence at Lincoln's Inn in 1737. Four years later he married and went to live at his country seat of Whitminster, Gloucestershire. In 1751 he moved to Twickenham, where he entertained a brilliant circle of his famous contemporaries, including Thomas Gray, Charles James Fox, and William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Horace Walpole (Walpole, Horace, 4th earl of Orford) in his letters makes many jesting allusions to Cambridge in the character of newsmonger. Cambridge contributed 21 papers to the World (1753–56), but his chief work is the Scribleriad (1751), a mock-epic poem satirizing false learning, the hero of which is Martinus Scriblerus, created by Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, and others of the Scriblerus Club.

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