John Durant Breval

John Durant Breval (c.1680 – January 1738) was an English poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer. He started his literary career under the alias of Joseph Gay and later gained popularity as a travel writer while using his own name after 37 editions of his Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, Relating Chiefly to their Antiquities and History were published in England between 1726 and 1738.

Early life Breval descended from a French refugee protestant family, and was the son of Francis Durant de Breval, prebendary of Rochester from 1671 and on and then prebendary of Westminster starting from 1675. Sir John Bramston, in his Autobiography (1845), describes the elder Breval in 1672 as "formerly a priest of the Romish church, and of the companie of those in Somerset House, but now a convert to the protestant religion and a preacher at the Savoy". This refers to the Queen's Chapel of the Savoy built by Inigo Jones where Henrietta Maria of France, wife of King Charles I, could exercise her Roman Catholic religion. Bramston gives 1666 as the date of the senior Breval conversion.

The younger Breval was admitted a Queen's Scholar of Westminster School in 1693, was elected to Trinity College, Cambridge, 1697, and was one of the Cambridge poets who celebrated in that year the return of William III after the peace of Ryswick. Breval proceeded B. A. 1700, and M.A. 1704. In 1702 he was made fellow of Trinity.

Breval, however, declared on oath that he was not guilty of immoral conduct in the matter, and bitterly resented the interposition of Bentley, who, he declared, had a private grudge both against his father and himself. His friends said that the alleged offense rested on mere rumor and suspicion, and that the expelled fellow would have good grounds for an action against the college. Such an action, however, was never brought, probably on account of Breval's poverty. As Bentley wrote, "his father was just dead [Francis Breval d. February 1707] in poor circumstances, and all his family were beggars." It was probably during this journey that he met with the romantic adventure that gave occasion for Alexander Pope's sneer about being 'followed by a nun' (Dunciad, iv. 327). A nun confined against her will, in a convent at Milan, fell in love with and 'escaped to him.' The lady afterwards went to Rome, where, according to Horace Walpole, she 'pleaded her cause and was acquitted there, and married Breval;' but she is not noticed in the account which Breval published of his travels, under the title of 'Remarks on several Parts of Europe,' four vols. (vols. i/ii, 1726; vols. i/ii. 1738), though we have a somewhat elaborate description of Milan, and an account of 'a Milanese Lady of great Beauty, who bequeathed her Skeleton to the Publick as a memento mori.'

The cause of Pope's quarrel with Breval is to be sought elsewhere. The well-known poet John Gay, with the help of Pope and John Arbuthnot, produced the farce entitled Three Hours after Marriage, which was deservedly damned. At this time (1717) Breval, who was writing a good deal for Edmund Curll, wrote for him, under the pseudonym of 'Joseph Gay,' a satire called The Confederates, in which 'the late famous comedy' and its three authors were unsparingly ridiculed. Pope is described in the prologue as one

"On whom Dame Nature nothing good bestowed: In Form a Monkey; but for spite a Toad,"

and he is represented (scene 1) as saying, 'And from My Self my own Thersites drew,' and then Thersites is explained as 'A Character in Homer, of an Ill-natur'd, Deform'd Villain.' In the same year Breval published, under similar auspices, Pope's 'Miscellany.' The second part consisted of five brief coarse and worthless poems, in one of which especially, called the 'Court Ballad,' Pope is mercilessly ridiculed. Revenge for these was taken in the Dunciad, and Breval's name occurs twice in the second book (1728).

In the notes (1729) affixed to the first passage Pope says that some account must be given of Breval owing to his obscurity, and declares that Curll put 'Joseph Gay' on such pamphlets that they might pass for Mr. Gay's (viz. John Gay's). In 1742, when Breval had been dead four years, the fourth book of the 'Dunciad' was published. In line 272 a 'lac'd Governor from France' is introduced with his pupil, and their adventures abroad are narrated at some length (273–336). Pope, though, as he states, giving him no particular name, chiefly had Breval in his mind when he wrote the lines (Horace Walpole, Notes on the Poems of Alexander Pope, p. 101, contributed by Sir W. Fraser, 1876).

Travel writer After the publication of his 'Travels' Breval was probably again engaged as travelling governor to young gentlemen of position. In the account of Paris given in the second volume of his 'Remarks' he says that he has collected the information 'in ten several tours thither' (p. 262). In the latter period of his life he wrote 'The Harlot's Progress,' an illustrated poem in six cantos, suggested by Hogarth's well-known prints, and said by Ambrose Philips, in a prefatory letter, to be 'a true Key and lively Explanation of the Painter's Hieroglyphicks' (1732); The History of the most Illustrious House of Nassau, with regard to that branch of it more particularly that came into the succession of Orange (1734); The Rape of Helen, a mock opera (acted at Covent Garden), (1737).

Later life Shortly after the publication of this last piece Breval died at Paris, January 1738, "universally beloved".