He was a fluent versifier, and would write 50o verses in one night.
Who would not pity the poor versifier at the outset of his career?
In 1757 Voltaire came to reside at Lausanne; and although he took but little notice of the young Englishman of twenty, who eagerly sought and easily obtained an introduction, the establishment of the theatre at Monrepos, where the brilliant versifier himself declaimed before select audiences his own productions on the stage, had no small influence in fortifying Gibbon's taste for the French theatre, and in at the same time abating that "idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman."
These are not the words of a man who is following a complete and authoritative poem; judging from the context of the other references to Bleheris he was rather a collector and versifier of short episodic tales, and it seems far more natural to understand Thomas as having wrought into one complete and consecutive form the various poems with which the name of Breri was associated, than to hold that that, or a similar, work had already been achieved by another.
Simon Bradstreet (1603-1697), important among the early men of Massachusetts, was one of the founders; and his wife, Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612-1672), was the first woman versifier of America; the Bradstreet house in North Andover, said to have been built about 1667, is still standing.
