| Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition | Public Domain via Project Gutenberg |
(1832- ), English divine and man of letters, born at Letterkenny, Donegal, Ireland, in 1832, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1857, and held various charges in London. From 1863 to 1865 he was chaplain to the empress Frederick in Berlin, and in 1872 he became chaplain in ordinary to Queen Victoria. But in 1880 he seceded from the Church, being no longer able to accept its leading dogmas, and officiated as a Unitarian minister for some years at Bedford chapel, Bloomsbury. Bedford chapel was pulled down about 1894, and from that time he had no church of his own, but his eloquence and powerful religious personality continued to make themselves felt among a wide circle. A man of independent means, he was always keenly interested in literature and art, and a fine critic of both. He published in 1865 his Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson (of Brighton), and in 1876 wrote an admirable primer of English Literature (new and revised ed., 1900), followed in 1892 by The History of Early English Literature (2 vols., 1892) down to the accession of Alfred, and English Literature from the Beginnings to the Norman Conquest (1898). His other works include various volumes of sermons; Poems (1888); Dove Cottage (1890); Theology in the English Poets—Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns (1874); Tennyson, his Art and Relation to Modern Life (1894); The Poetry of Robert Browning (1902); On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (1905); and The Life Superlative (1906).