ABSTRACT
John Frederick Bryant was born in 1753 in Westminster, but spent much of his childhood in Bristol, the city from which his father originated. Periods of employment as a labourer in London followed these disappointments, and he eventually returned to Bristol, in the footsteps of his father two decades before, to resume pipe-making. For Bryant, as for several other poets in the present volume, the itinerant life proved conducive to poetic production. Bryant appears to have experienced greater fortune and more harmonious relations with his patrons than almost any other comparable poet. The volume's anonymous editor thought otherwise. He envisaged that some of Bryant's readers 'may be desirous of seeing the gradual progress of natural poetical genius, unassisted by education' and so 'it has been thought proper to print progressive specimens of his Verses, from the first essay down to the work in which he is now engaged'.
