Bloomfield

Bloomfield, Robert, the son of a village tailor, was born at Honington, Suffolk, in 1766, and was brought up first as a farm labourer, being afterwards (1781) apprenticed to a shoemaker in London. His latent poetical genius was stirred by reading Thomson's Seasons, and two of his compositions found a place in the London Magazine. He now devoted some years of labour to a more ambitious effort, and it was not until 1798 that his masterpiece, The Farmer's Boy, was completed. It was printed in 1800 at the expense of Mr. Capel Lofft, and had a large sale, being translated, too, into French and Italian. Bloomfield, after the custom of the times, obtained a small post in the Seal Office, but had to resign it on account of ill-health. His later poems, except Wild Flowers, did not win popular favour, and he sank into great poverty, dying of brain-disease at Shefford, Bedfordshire, in 1823.