ABSTRACT
Simon Ockley, clerk in holy orders and Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic in the University of Cambridge, was writing on May 6, 1718 , to his friend James Keith. He was writing to him from Cambridge Castle, the debtor’s prison to which he had been committed in February of the preceding year; the sum he owed was £200, and as his annual stipend from the Professor ship was only £40, and the benefice of Swavesey which he held was not among the richer livings of the Church, the prospect of an early release must have seemed somewhat bleak. Thanks to Keith and other influential admirers his debts were presently paid and he was free to return to Swavesey. But his health and his spirit were alike broken, and on August 9, 1720, he died, being forty-two years of age. He left behind him in dire poverty a widow and many children. He had fully earned inclusion by Isaac Disraeli in his Calamity of Authors.
