ST JOHN, JAMES AUGUSTUS (1801-1875), traveller and author, was born in Carmarthenshire, Wales, on 24th September 1801. After attending a village grammar-school he received private instruction from a clergyman in the classics, and also acquired proficiency in French, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian. At the age of seventeen he went to London, where he obtained a connexion with a Plymouth newspaper, and, along with James Silk Buckingham, became editor of the Oriental Herald. In 1827, along with D. L. Richardson, he founded the London Weekly Review, which was subsequently purchased by Colburn and transformed into the Court Journal. About 1829 he left London for Normandy, and in 1830 published an account of his experiences there under the title Journal of a Residence in _Normandy (2 vols.). After spending some time in Paris and Switzerland he set out for Nubia and Egypt, visiting the second cataract in a small vessel. He made important discoveries in regard to volcanic agencies on both sides of the Nile, and found traces of volcanic agency in the Libyan Desert. He also explored the antiquities connected with the religion of ancient Egypt. The results of his journey were published under the titles Egypt and Mohammed Ali, or Travels in the Valley of the Nile (2 vols., -1834), Egypt and Nubia, (1844), and Isis, an Egyptian Pilgrimage (2 vols., 1853). He died on 22d September 1875.

St John was also the author of Lives of Celebrated Travellers (1830), Anatomy of Society (1831), History, Manners, and Customs of the Hindus (1831), Margaret Ravenscroft, or Second Love (3 vols., 1835), The Hellenes, or Manners and Customs of Ancient Greece (1842), Sir Cosmo Digby, a novel (1844), Views In Borneo (1847), There and Back Again in Search of Beauty (1853), The Nemesis of Power (1854), Philosophy at the Foot of the Cross (1854), The Preaching of Christ (1855), The Ring and the Veil, a novel (1856), Life of Louis Napoleon (1857), History of the Four Conquests of England (1862), Weighed in the Balance, a novel (1864), and Life of Sir Walter Raleigh (1868). He also edited, with notes, various English classics.

Of his four sons, all of some literary distinction-Percy Bolingbroke, Bayle, Spenser, and Horace Roscoe-the second, BAYLE ST Jonx (1822-1869), predeceased him. He was educated privately, and began contributing to the periodicals when only thirteen. At the age of twenty he wrote a series of papers for Fraser under the title " De Re Vehiculari." To the same magazine he contributed a series of essays on Montaigne, and, after continuing his studies on the same subject for some time, he published in 1857 Montaigne the Essayist, a Biography, in 4 volumes. In 1846 he passed through France and Italy on his way to Egypt, where, during a residence of two years, he wrote The Libyan Desert (1849). On his return he settled for some time in Paris and published Two Years in a Levantine Family (1850) and Views in the Oasis of Siwah (1850). After a second visit to the East he published Village Life in Egypt (1852). From this time he continued until twelve months of his death to reside in France, and as the result of his residence there published Purple Tints of Paris : Characters and Manners in the New Empire (1854), The Louvre, or Biography of a Museum (1855), and the Subalpine Kingdom, or Experiences and Studies in Savoy (1856). He was also the author of Travels of an Arab Merchant in the Soudan (1854), 3laretirno, a Story of Adventure (1856), and Memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, in the Reign of Louis XIV.

(4 vols., 1857).