Note 33 — The Mirror for Magistrates.

John Higgins was born about 1544. He was educated at Christ Church, and in 1572 describes himself as late student at Oxford. He did not learn the tongues or begin to write until he was twenty years of age, and then studied, chiefly, French and Latin. At twenty-five he taught grammar for about two years, and spent as much time in enlarging Huloet’s Dictionary. He also translated phrases from Aldus, the Flowers of Terence, and wrote, with divers other works, the first part of the Mirror for Magistrates before he was thirty. This brief account is related by himself in some lines preserved in a note at the end of the legend of Mempricius. (See vol. i. p. 102.) In December 1586, while residing at Winsham, in Somersetshire, or, as Wood has it, in Surrey, he prepared and edited, as already noticed, the best edition extant of the present work. Before 1602, it is not improbable, he had established a school at Winsham, or taken orders, for in that year he published a tract upon a subject of theological controversy. The time of his death is uncertain. For a list of his works see Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. i. col. 734, ed. 1813.