WOLCOT, JOHN (1738-1819), English satirist and poet, known under the pseudonym of PETER PINDAR, was baptized at Dodbrooke, Devonshire, on May 9, 1738. He was apprenticed to his uncle, John Wolcot, a surgeon at Fowey, and he took his degree of M.D. at Aberdeen in 1767. In 1769 he was ordained, and went to Jamaica with Sir William Trelawny, the governor, In 1772 he became incumbent of Vere, Jamaica, but on the death of his patron (1772) he returned to England, and settled as a physician at Truro. In 1781 Wolcot went to London, and took with him the young Cornish artist, John Opie, whose talents in painting he had been the first to recognize. He soon achieved fame by a succession of pungent satires on George III. Two of Wolcot's happiest satires on the "farmer king" depicted the royal survey of Whit bread's brewery, and the king's naïve wonder how the apples got into the dumplings. He had a broad sense of humour, a keen eye
for the ridiculous, and great felicity of imagery and expression. Some of his serious pieces—his rendering of Thomas Warton's epi gram on Sleep and his Lord Gregory, for example—reveal an un expected fund of genuine tenderness. He died at Latham Place, Somers Town, London, on Jan. 14, 1819, and was buried near Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, in St. Paul's, Covent Garden.
Polwhele, the Cornish historian, was well acquainted with Wolcot in his early life, and the best account of his residence in the west is found in vol. i. of Polwhele's Traditions and in Polwhele's Biographical Sketches, vol. ii. Cyrus Redding was a frequent visitor at the old man's house, and has described Wolcot's later days in his Past Celeb rities, vol. i., and his Fifty Years' Recollections, vols. i. and ii.