COLMAN, GEORGE English dramatist and essayist, usually called "the Elder," and sometimes "George the First," to distinguish him from his son, was born in 1732 at Florence, where his father was resident at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany. Colman's father died within a year of his son's birth, and the boy's education was undertaken by William Pulteney, afterwards Lord Bath, whose wife was Mrs. Colman's sister. He was sent to Westminster school and then to Christ Church, Oxford. Here he made the acquaintance of Bonnell Thornton, the parodist, and founded The Connoisseur a periodical which reached its 14oth number. He left Oxford in and was called' to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in In 176o he produced his first play, Polly Honeycomb, which mocked at the sentimentalities of the popular novel. In 1761 The Jealous Wife, a comedy partly founded on Tom Jones, made Colman famous. The Jealous Wife is one of the earliest instances of the successful dramatisation of a novelist's material, and is genuine comedy. The death of Lord Bath in 1764 placed Colman in possession of independent means. In '765 appeared his metrical translation of the plays of Terence, and in 1766 he produced The Clandestine Marriage, jointly with Garrick. Ir. the next year he purchased a fourth'share in the Covent Garden theatre. Colman was acting manager of Covent Garden for seven years, and during that period he produced many pieces of his own and several "adapted" plays of Shakespeare. In 1774 he sold his share in the playhouse, which had involved him in much litigation with his partners, to Leake; and three years later he purchased of Samuel Foote, then broken in health and spirits, the little theatre in the Haymarket. He was attacked with paralysis in 1785; in 1789 his brain became affected, and he died on Aug. 14, 1794. Besides the works already cited, Colman was author of adaptations of Beaumont and Fletcher's Bonduca, Ben Jonson's Epicoene, Mil ton's Comus, and of other plays. He also produced an edition of the works of Beaumont and Fletcher (1778), a version of the Ars Poetica of Horace, an excellent translation from the Mercator of Plautus for Bonne11 Thornton's edition 0769-72), some thirty plays, many parodies and occasional pieces. An incomplete edition of his dramatic works was published in 1777 in four volumes.