John Hookham Frere, an English poet and diplomatist, born in London, May 21, 1769, died in Malta, Jan. 7, 1846. He was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and while a school boy translated the remarkable war song upon the victory of Athelstan at Brunnenburg from the Anglo-Saxon of the 10th century into the Anglo-Norman of the 14th. It is found in the first volume of Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets." When at Eton, in connection with Canning and Robert Smith, he started and carried on to 40 numbers a weekly paper called the "Microcosm." On leaving Cambridge, in 1795, he entered the foreign office under Lord Gren-ville, and in the following year he was returned to parliament. He succeeded Canning as undersecretary for foreign affairs in 1801, and subsequently served in various diplomatic missions. During his leisure he made exquisite translations from the Greek and Spanish. In 1817 he published an extravaganza of the Pulci and Casti school, under the title of "Whistlecraft's Prospectus and Specimen of an Intended National Poem" (also called The Monks and the Giants"), which treated in a light and satirical way the adventures of King Arthur. Its peculiar stanza and sarcastic pleasantry formed the immediate exemplar of Byron's "Beppo and Don Juan." Frere was a contributor to the"Anti-Jacobin,and was one of the founders of the London "Quarterly Review." For many years before his death he resided in Malta, receiving from the government a liberal diplomatic pension.

See his "Works in Prose and Verse," with memoir by his nephews (2 vols., London, 1872).-His nephew, Sir Henry Bar-tle Edward, born in 1815, was governor of Bombay from 1862 to 1867, and subsequently became vice president of the royal geographical society. In 1873 he negotiated a treaty with the sultan of Zanzibar for the suppression of the slave trade.