John Delap

John Delap (1725–1812) was an English churchman and academic, known as a poet and dramatist. Life The son of John Delap, of Spilsby in Lincolnshire, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, but migrated to Magdalene College, and was admitted pensioner on 15 March 1743. He took the degrees of B.A. in 1747, M.A. in 1750, and D.D. in 1762, and was described on the last occasion as of Trinity College. On 30 December 1748 he was elected to a fellowship at Magdalene. Delap was ordained in the Church of England, and was once curate to William Mason. The united livings of Iford and Kingston near Lewes in Sussex were conferred on him in 1765, and he became rector of Woollavington in 1774. But he lived at South Street, Lewes, where he died in 1812, aged 87. Delap used to visit Henry and Hester Thrale in Brighton or Tunbridge Wells, so knew Samuel Johnson and Fanny Burney, who found his conversation onerous- Johnson for Delap's obsession with his health, and Burney for the manner in which, despite being "commonly and naturally grave, silent, and absent", Delap would "work... threadbare" any subject raised in conversation on which he had anything to say. Works Delap's first work was Marcellus, a Monody, 1751, inspired by the death of Frederick, Prince of Wales, inscribed to his widow. It was succeeded by a number of elegies (1760); two which may have been among those were in George Pearch's Collection of Poems. His thesis for his divinity degree (12 April 1762) was published in 1763, Mundi perpetuus administrator Christus.