Born probably at Duns, Berwickshire, in 1721(?): died at St. Christopher, West Indies, Dec. 16, 1766. A Scottish physician and poet. After 1753 he settled in London, where he became intimate with Johnson and other famous men. In 1759 he went to the West Indies. He published a number of works, including essays, etc., on medicine. Among his poems are an “Ode on Solitude” (in Dodsley’s collection, 1755), and “The Sugar Cane” (1764). He translated part of Ovid’s “Epistles” (1758), and the “Elegies of Tibullus” and the poems of Sulpicia (1759). He assisted, with others, Charlotte Lenox in her translation of Brumoy’s “Théâtre des Grecs” (1759).

Personal

  A man of modesty and reserve and in spite of a broad provincial dialect, extremely pleasing in his conversation. He was tall, and of a lathy make; plain-featured, and deeply marked with small-pox; his eyes were quiet and keen; his temper generous and good-natured; and he was an able man in the knowledge of his profession.

  In person he was tall and of “a lathy make,” plain-featured, and deeply marked with the small-pox. Despite a broad provincial accent his conversation was very pleasing. By his wife he left two daughters, Louise Agnes, and Eleanor. The latter was married in 1798 to Thomas Rousell of Wandsworth. A foul attack on Mrs. Grainger, imputing her husband’s premature death to grief at the discovery of her immorality, was published during her lifetime in the “Westminster Magazine” for December 1773. Percy sent an indignant denial to the “Whitehall Evening Post,” and threatened legal proceedings, upon which the libel was withdrawn and apologised for in January 1774. Grainger bequeathed his manuscripts to Percy.

General

  Johnson said, that Dr. Grainger was an agreeable man; a man who would do any good that was in his power. His translation of “Tibullus,” he thought, was very well done; but “The Sugar-Cane,” a poem, did not please him; for, he exclaimed, “What could he make of a sugar-cane? One might as well write the ‘Parsley-bed, a Poem;’ or ‘The Cabbage-garden, a Poem.’”

  Mr. Chalmers censures Grainger for having chosen the sugar cane as the subject of a didactic poem: “connected,” he says, “as an English merchant may be with the produce of the West Indies, it will not be easy to persuade the reader of English poetry to study the cultivation of the sugar plant, merely that he may add some new imagery to the more ample stores which he can contemplate without study or trouble.” The critic’s objection is not to the kind of poem, but to the particular subject; now it would be impossible to select any subject for that kind which is capable of being so richly and variously adorned. If Grainger has invoked the muse to sing of rats, and metamorphosed, in Arcadian phrase, negro slaves into swains, the fault is in the writer, not in the topic. The arguments which he has prefixed are indeed ludicrously flat and formal.

  The novelty of West Indian scenery inspired him with the unpromising subject of the Sugar-cane, in which he very poetically dignifies the poor negroes with the name of “Swains.”

  The two exact contemporaries of Akenside claim mention here only on the strength of one fine lily apiece—James Grainger a didactic West Indian sugar-planting physician, having published in 1755 an “Ode to Solitude,” before he began to sing of canes and swains in tedious couplets.