1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Lemierre, Antoine Marin

LEMIERRE, ANTOINE MARIN (1733–1793), French dramatist and poet, was born in Paris on the 12th of January 1733. His parents were poor, but Lemierre found a patron in the collector-general of taxes, Dupin, whose secretary he became. Lemierre gained his first success on the stage with Hypermnestre (1758); Térée (1761) and Idoménée (1764) failed on account of the subjects. Artaxerce, modelled on Metastasio, and Guillaume Tell were produced in 1766; other successful tragedies were La Veuve de Malabar (1770) and Barnavelt (1784). Lemierre revived Guillaume Tell in 1786 with enormous success. After the Revolution he professed great remorse for the production of a play inculcating revolutionary principles, and there is no doubt that the horror of the excesses he witnessed hastened his death, which took place on the 4th of July 1793. He had been admitted to the Academy in 1781. Lemierre published La Peinture (1769), based on a Latin poem by the abbé de Marsy, and a poem in six cantos, Les Fastes, ou les usages de l’année (1779), an unsatisfactory imitation of Ovid’s Fasti.

His Œuvres (1810) contain a notice of Lemierre by R. Perrin and his Œuvres choisies (1811) one by F. Fayolle.