Horace Keats echoed the opening of Horace's "Epodes" 14 in the opening lines of "Ode to a Nightingale". The Roman poet was presented in the nineteenth century as an honorary English gentleman. William Thackeray produced a version of "Odes" in which Horace's questionable 'boy' became 'Lucy', and Gerard Manley Hopkins translated the boy innocently as 'child'. Horace was translated by Sir Theodore Martin (biographer of Prince Albert) but minus some ungentlemanly verses, such as the erotic "Odes" and "Epodes" 8 and 12. Lord Lytton produced a popular translation and William Gladstone also wrote translations during his last days as Prime Minister.
John Ker (Latin poet) John Ker (Latin poet) John Ker (died 1741) was a Scottish schoolteacher and academic, a classical scholar known as a neo-Latin poet. Ker was born at Dunblane, Perthshire, and was for a time schoolmaster at Crieff. About 1710, after examination by ministers and professors, he became a master in the Royal High School, Edinburgh. In 1717 he was appointed professor of Greek in King's College, Aberdeen, the first specialist teacher of the subject there, despite his admiration for the uncompromising Jacobite Archibald Pitcairne. On 2 October 1734 Ker succeeded Adam Watt in the Latin chair at Edinburgh University. He studied