John Morfitt

John Morfitt of Birmingham entered the contest on the side of Weston and Dryden in a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in January 1790 (pp. 6-7).  Previously he had published Philotoxi Ardenæ: The Woodman of Arden; A Latin Poem (Birmingham: M. Swinney, 1788), which included an essay by Weston ‘On the Superiority of Dryden’s Versification over that of Pope and the Moderns’. In his letter in the Gentleman’s Magazine, Morfitt writes that ‘Miss Seward seems to reason from parts, and Mr. W. from the whole; and I am convinced, from my personal knowledge of the former, that she does great violence to her feelings in the mode of conducting this dispute’ (GM, p. 7).