Hugh Downman

Hugh Downman (1740–1809) was an English physician, poet and dramatist, the son of Hugh Downman of Newton House, near Exeter. Educated at Exeter grammar school and Balliol College, Oxford, he was ordained in 1763 but turned to medicine, studying at Edinburgh, where he boarded with the blind poet Thomas Blacklock. He practised in Exeter for most of his life and died at Alphington, near Exeter, in 1809.

His first publication, The Land of the Muses (1768), was a Spenserian poem addressed to Blacklock; his best-known work, the didactic poem Infancy (1774–76), is not included here. This selection draws on his Poems (second edition, Exeter, 1790) — odes, elegies, sonnets and the Death-Song of Ragnar Lodbrach, rendered from the Latin of Olaus Wormius — together with the Poems to Thespia (1781) and the earlier Land of the Muses volume (1768), where these add pieces not in the 1790 book.