John Sheppard 

John Sheppard (1785-1879) was a significant Baptist author and layman from Frome, Somerset, where Sheppards had lived since the late 17th c.  After finishing school in 1800, he began working in the woolen trade (his family were prosperous factory owners and merchants) and in 1806 he, along with his widowed mother, joined the Baptist congregation at Sheppard’s Barton, Frome, where many of his relatives worshiped. At that time the church was led by John Foster (1770-1843), who had succeeded Job David as pastor in 1804. Foster and Sheppard would maintained a life-long friendship. Sheppard inherited enough of a fortune from his uncle to cease working and enroll at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine, philosophy and Hebrew. While at Edinburgh, he became friends with Thomas Chalmers and Pinkerton the antiquary. In 1816 and 1817, he toured parts of Europe and studied briefly at Gottingen. From 1823 until his death he devoted himself to religious writing, lay preaching, and foreign travel. He died at Frome on 30 April 1879. His major works include: Athaliah, translated from Racine (1815); Letters on a Tour of France (1817); Thoughts Preparative to or Persuasive to Private Devotion (1823; An Autumn Dream (a long poem) (1837); A Cursory View of the State of Religion in France (1838); On Dreams (1847); On Trees, their Uses and Biography (1848); The Foreign Sacred Lyre (1857); and The Christian Harp (1858). See T. G. Rooke, “Memoir of John Sheppard,” in Thoughts Preparative to or Persuasive to Private Devotion, by John Sheppard, 5-34 (London: Religious Tract Society, 1881); J. E. Ryland, Life and Correspondence of John Foster, 2 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852); Timothy Whelan, “Thomas Poole’s ‘Intimations of Immortality’ in a Letter to John Sheppard, February 1837,” Romanticism 11 (2005), 199-223.