Frere,

Frere, JOHN HOOKHAM, the translator of Aristophanes, was born of a good Suffolk family, in London, 21st May 1769, and was educated at Eton and Caius College, Cambridge. He next entered the foreign office under Lord Grenville, and in 1796 he was returned for the Cornish pocket-borough of Looe. Along with his old schoolfellow Canning he gave steady support to Pitt's government, and contributed to the Anti-Jacobin (1797-98), for which, with Canning and Ellis, he wrote The Loves of the Triangles, a parody on Darwin's Loves of the Plants, The Needy Knife-grinder, &c. Under-secretary for Foreign Affairs (1799), he was appointed envoy to Lisbon (1800), and then twice minister to Spain (1802 and 1808), where his position was one of extreme difficulty. He was recalled after the retreat to Corunna, and, renouncing public life, retired in 1821 to Malta, although he was offered the embassy to St Petersburg and twice the honour of a peerage. Here he devoted himself to the study of Greek, Hebrew, and Maltese, was famous for his hospitality, and died 7th January 1841. Frere's clever mock-heroic poem entitled Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work by William and Robert Whistlercraft, of Stowmarket, in Suffolk, Harness and Collar Makers, &c. (1817), suggested its ottava rima to Byron for his Beppo; but his fame rests securest on his admirable translations of the Acharnians, the Knights, the Birds, and the Frogs of Aristophanes. These are themselves works of genius, and remain without a rival, yet were privately printed, and only made public by Sir G. Cornewall Lewis in the Classical Museum for 1847. Frere's works were published in 1871 by his nephews; see also Gabrielle Festing, J. H. Frere and his Friends (1899).