Author: Johns, Mrs.
Biography:
JOHNS, Mary, formerly Hellier (1732-1792: GM)
Born Mary Hellier, the poet married Thomas Johns (q.v.) on 3 Feb. 1754 at Charles the Martyr, Plymouth, Devon. She outlived her children, Frederick (d 1776), Elisha Arnold (d 1780), and John (d 1791). Several of her verses in Poems by the Late Mr. and Mrs. Johns, of Plymouth, are stilted and saccharine. The metre of her religious poems—iambic and trochaic tetrameter—normally musical is instead dreary and monotonous. More interesting is her use of iambic pentameter in “A Riddle” in which she describes a character that may resemble her own: intellectual and companionable yet libel to “raise a mental storm” and to plant “daggers … in many a worthy heart.” She died, probably at Plymouth, on 2 Feb 1792 and was buried six days later, in Charles the Martyr. The obituarist in GM praised her knowledge of “elegant and polite literature” and her “highly cultivated” mind. In his will, her husband directed the Rev. Thomas Drewitt to compose a set of verses that there were to be engraved on her tomb. He advised Drewitt to praise her tenderness as a mother, her faithfulness as a wife, and her talents in poetry and prose. The resulting inscription, “by a friend,” is the closing entry in Poems. (ancestry.com 11 Nov. 2023; PROB 11/1292; GM 62:1 [1792], 186; L. F. W. J. Llewellyn, History of Plymouth [1873], 2:520) JC
Other Names:
- Mrs. Johns of Plymouth