Joseph Beaumont

Joseph Beaumont (13 March 1616 – 23 November 1699) was an English clergyman, academic and poet.

Life Beaumont was the son of John Beaumont and Sarah Clarke. He was born in Hadleigh, Suffolk, on 13 March 1616. Educated at Hadleigh grammar school, he proceeded to Cambridge in 1631, where he was admitted as a pensioner to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He took his degree of B.A. in 1634, and became a fellow of his college in 1636,

In 1689, Beaumont was appointed to meet the leaders of nonconformity as one of the commissioners of comprehension. He preached before the university on 5 November 1699, died on 23 November, and was buried in the college chapel of Peterhouse.

Works Psyche was published early in 1648. The allegorical poem represents the soul led by divine grace and her guardian angel through the various temptations and assaults of life into her eternal felicity; it is written in a six-line heroic stanza, and contains, in its abridged form, 30,000 lines. In 1702, Charles Beaumont, the only surviving son, brought out a new edition, entirely revised and enlarged by the addition of four fresh cantos.

A life of Beaumont was written by John Gee of Peterhouse, who affixed it to the collection of Beaumont's poems, which he first edited at Cambridge in 1749; further information was published by Hugh Pigot in his History of Hadleigh in 1860. The complete poems of Beaumont, in English and Latin, were first edited, in two quarto volumes., privately printed, by A. B. Grosart in 1880, with a memoir in which some additions are made to the information preserved by Gee.

Beaumont prefixed a copy of Latin verses to the Muse Juridicae of William Hawkins in 1634, and published in 1665, at Cambridge, Some Observations upon the Apologie of Dr. Henry More. An artist of some pretension, he adorned the altar of Peterhouse Chapel with scripture scenes which have now disappeared.