CREECH, Thomas (1659-1701), an English translator from the classics, was born at Blandford near Sherborne in Dorsetshire. He studied at Wadham College, Oxford, and obtained a fellowship first in that college and afterwards at All Souls’. In 1699 he received a college living, but not more than two years after he hanged himself. The immediate cause of the act was not improbably a money difficulty, though according to some it was a love disappointment; but Creech was naturally of a melancholic temper. Creech’s fame rests on his translation of Lucretius, in which, according to Otway, the pure ore of the original “somewhat seems refined.” But in truth the commonplace equability of its rhymed heroic couplets, the chief merit of which is their straightforward simplicity, is very far from being an adequate translation of the powerful poetry of Lucretius; and even the easy mechanism of the rhyme is faulty in innumerable cases, Creech’s version of Horace, which is still less adequate, was a failure from the first. He also translated the Idylls of Theocritus, the Thirteenth Satire of Juvenal, the Astronomicon of Manilius, and parts of Plutarch, Virgil, and Ovid. Creech’s edition of the text of Lucretius, with notes borrowed from Lambinus and Faber, has been much used.