POMFRET, John (1667-1703), holds a certain place in English letters as the author of a short poem, The Choice, which embodies in easy and happy Drydenic diction the refined Epicureanism of the 18th century, and was consequently wide, y popular throughout that century. Pomfret was an English clergyman, rector of Maulden in Bedfordshire, son of the vicar of Luton in the same county. The story is preserved by Johnson that the bishop of London stopped him in some church preferment because in his Choice he declared that he would have no wife, although he expressed a wish for the occasional company of a modest and sprightly young lady. The poet was married in real life all the same, and, while waiting in London to clear up a misunderstanding caused by the paganism of his poetry—the bishop apparently thinking that he had openly preferred a mistress to a wife—he caught small-pox and died at the age of thirty-five. Of his poetry Johnson happily says, “He pleases many; and he who pleases many must have some species of merit.”