son of Sir
Henry Blount and brother of Charles Blount (q.v.), was born at Upper
Holloway on the 12th of September 1649. He succeeded to the estate of
Tittenhanger on his mother's death in 1678, and in the following year
was created a baronet. He represented the borough of St Albans in the
two last parliaments of Charles II. and was knight of the shire from the
revolution till his death. He married Jane, daughter of Sir Henry
Caesar, by whom he had five sons and nine daughters. He died at
Tittenhanger on the 30th of June 1697. His _Censura celebrorum authorum
sive tractatus in quo varia virorum doctorum de clarissimis cujusque
seculi scriptoribus judicia traduntur_ (1690) was originally compiled
for Blount's own use, and is a dictionary in chronological order of what
various eminent writers have said about one another. This necessarily
involved enormous labour in Blount's time. It was published at Geneva in
1694 with all the quotations from modern languages translated into
Latin, and again in 1710. His other works are _A Natural History,
containing many not common observations extracted out of the best modern
writers_ (1693), _De re poetica, or remarks upon Poetry, with Characters
and Censures of the most considerable Poets_ ... (1694), and _Essays on
Several Occasions_ (1692). It is on this last work that his claims to be
regarded as an original writer rest. The essays deal with the perversion
of learning, a comparison between the ancients and the moderns (to the
advantage of the latter), the education of children, and kindred topics.
In the third edition (1697) he added an eighth essay, on religion, in
which he deprecated the multiplication of ceremonies. He displays
throughout a hatred of pedantry and convention, which makes his book
still interesting.

See A. Kippis, _Biographia Britannica_ (1780), vol. ii. For an account
of Blount's family see Robert Clutterbuck. _History and Antiquities of
the County of Hertford_ (1815), vol. i. pp. 207-212.

BLOUNT, WILLIAM (1749-1800), American politician, was born in Bertie
county, North Carolina, on the 26th of March 1749. He was a member of
the Continental Congress in 1783-1784 and again in 1786-1787, of the
constitutional convention at Philadelphia in 1787, and of the state
convention which ratified the Federal constitution for North Carolina in
1789. From 1790 until 1796 he was, by President Washington's
appointment, governor of the "Territory South of the Ohio