an English clergyman, biographer, and miscellaneous writer, whose works include the libretto to George Frideric Handel's Hercules. He was an industrious writer in many kinds of composition. He published an Historical Dictionary of all Religions from the Creation of the World to the Present Times (1742), a huge work in two volumes folio ; he translated Voltaire's Temple of Taste and part of Pierre Bayle's Dictionary; vindicated orthodox Christianity against Matthew Tindal; converted a Roman Catholic book (Dorrel on the Epistles and Gospels) to Protestant uses; edited John Dryden; wrote in defence of the immortality of the soul; and contributed the lives marked 'T' in the original edition of the Biographia Britannica.
