Richard Glover (1712-85)

English poet, born in London. Though Glover published great volumes of epic poems, Leonidas (9 books, 1737) and the posthumously published The Athenaid (30 books, 1788), he is most remembered as the author of "Admiral Hosier's Ghost" (1739), included in Thomas Percy's Reliques (1765). This was a ballad aimed at exciting the nation against the Spaniards, by contrasting the fate of Admiral Francis Hosier (1673-1727), who was sent in 1726 with a fleet to the Spanish West Indies to blockade Portobelo, a small seaport on the Caribbean coast of Panama, and principal city of Spanish colonial America, and who died of yellow fever as did his 4,000 men, and the fate of Admiral Edward Vernon (1684-1757), who succeeded in attacking the same place with a squadron of only five ships in 1739. Its high popularity even in the Victorian Age was a cause of Alfred Tennyson's writing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854). (M. Y.)