Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Davis, James
DAVID, JAMES (d. 1755), satirical writer, a Welshman, was a member of Jesus College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. on 13 Oct. 1726, M.A. on 9 July 1729. Turning his attention to medicine, he proceeded M.B. on 7 Dec. 1732. He practised as a physician at Devizes, Wiltshire, and died on 13 July 1755 (Gent. Mag. xxv. 333). The year before his death he published anonymously ‘Origines Divisianæ; or the Antiquities of the Devizes: In some familiar Letters to a Friend wrote in the years 1750 and 1751,’ 8vo, London, 1754, a well-written jeu d'esprit aimed at the absurd etymologies of Musgrave, Stukeley, Wise, Baxter, and Willis. It was reprinted as the work of ‘Dr. Davies’ in vol. ii. of ‘The Repository,’ 12mo, London, 1777–83. Owing to a misstatement by George Hardinge the piece has been wrongly ascribed to Dr. Sneyd Davies (Nichols, Lit. Illustr. i. 682). The doctor's jokes deceived the author of ‘Chronicles of the Devizes,’ who has reproduced some of the choicest as hard facts in what professes to be a grave biography of Davis. Among the Additional MSS. in the British Museum are three of Davis's letters to Professor John Ward, but wholly upon antiquarian subjects.
[Addit. MSS. 6210, f. 33, 6211, f. 8; Monthly Review, x. 231–7; Waylen's Chronicles of the Devizes, pp. 13, 345–6.]