Stillingfleet, Benjamin

Stillingfleet is a fascinating figure: he's the grandson of Bishop Stillingfleet; his father alienated his grandfather for Jacobitism and imprudence, and so Benjamin grew up in the classic poet's position of high social capital (he was admitted to Trinity because Bentley had been tutor to his grandfather) but low economic capital. He was a tutor to his second cousin, and lived as a tutor and then later pensioner of the Windham family for the thirty central years of his life. He was a good teacher and a dilettante man of learning, with a pious Anglican cast: he wrote dramas that were privately printed, a few anonymous poems, and was responsible for introducing Linnean taxonomy into England. Judging by the DNB entry he seems to have had an essentially amateur approach to poetry as to all of his belletristic projects--he prepared notes on PL but never published his edition, etc.