Pye, HENRY JAMES

Pye, HENRY JAMES, poet-laureate, was born in London, 10th July 1745, and educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1772 being made a D.C.L. He held a commission in the Berkshire militia, in 1784 was elected member for that county, in 1790 succeeded Warton as laureate, and in 1792 was appointed a London police magistrate. He died at Pinner, near Harrow, 13th August 1813. The works of 'poetical Pye' (in Scott's phrase), who, as the editor of Byron's Vision of Judgment remarked, was 'eminently respectable in everything but his poetry,' are nearly twenty in number, and include Alfred (1801), besides birthday and new-year odes.