DEATHS.-MARCH. his title and estates by the hon. Richard Neville, one of the representatives in parliament for the county of Berks. MARCH. 1. In Russell-square, Willoughby Rackham, esq. of Lincoln's-inn. 2. At her house in Bolton-row, aged 77, Frances, relict of sir William Jerningham, sixth baronet of Cossey, Norfolk. She was the eldest daughter of Henry eleventh viscount Dillon, by lady Charlotte Lee, daughter of George, first earl of Lichfield (and grand-daughter of lady Charlotte Fitzroy, daughter of king Charles II.) She was married to sir William Jerningham in June 1767. He was the representative of one of the few remaining families of English gentry, prior in date to the conquest, and was descended on his mother's side from king Edward III. Sir William died in 1809, leaving by his widow, the present baron Stafford, and Frances Georgiana, lady of sir Richard Bedingfield, besides two sons, since cut off in the flower of their age; viz. William, who signalised himself by his distinguished bravery in the Austrian service; and Edward, an English barrister, and secretary of the late British Catholic board, whose memory is affectionately cherished by all who knew him, and whose death was an irreparable loss to the members of his communion. 3. Frances, wife of Thomas Read Kempe, esq. M. P. for Arundel. In Dover-street, Piccadilly, lieut.-general sir James Erskine, third baronet, of Torrie, county of Fife. The Erskines of Torrie are descended from the second marriage He succeeded to that barony as heir general in 1824, on the reversal of the attainder of William Howard, visc. and baron Stafford. The viscountcy, conferred on the said William Howard, is now extinct, from default of heirs male, to whom it was limited. of John earl of Mar, high treasurer of Scotland temp. James VI. and son of the regent. The late sir James was the second son of sir William Erskine the first baronet, by his second wife Frances, daughter of James Moray of Abercairney (chief of that name, and descended from the earls of Strathmore), by Christian his wife, daughter to Alexander earl of Eglinton. He entered the army February 26, 1788, as ensign in the 26th foot, and in January 1789, sailed for Canada; he obtained a lieutenancy in the 7th foot, Jan. 9, 1798, and in July following returned to England. He was appointed captain of an independent company, March 8, 1791, and removed to the 37th, Nov. 1, that year. He served in the campaigns of 1793 and 4 in Flanders, and was present at the battles of Cateau, April 26, 1794; in the action of the 10th of May, on the plains of Cysoing; in the reserve in the actions of the 17th and 18th of that month; and at the battle of Tournay. He received the rank of major, May 19, 1794; the lieut.-colonelcy of the 133rd foot, Aug. 22; and was present at the actions near Boxtel. In April 1795, he returned to England; was appointed lieut.-colonel of 15th light Dragoons, Feb. 27, 1796; embarked for the Helder in Sept. 1799, and was engaged in the battle of Bergen, Oct. 2, following. Jan. 1, 1800, he obtained his brevet of colonel; and December 25 that year, was appointed aid-de-camp to the king. On the 5th of March, 1801, he married Louisa Paget, third daughter of Henry first earl of Uxbridge, and sister to the present marquess of Anglesey, K. G. He was removed to the lieut. colonelcy of 2nd dragoons, Feb. 10, 1803; was promoted brigadier gen. on the staff of Great Britain, March 3, 1804; and continued to serve on that and the Irish staff, till he received the rank of major gen. April 25, 1808. He cominanded a district in Scotland till April 1809, DEATHS.-MARCH. when he quitted England for Portugal, in command of a brigade of cavalry. 5. In his 64th year, Mr. Charles Bell, of Brunswick-street, many years printer of the Times newspaper. 6. At Camberwell, Eliza Jekyll, wife of rev. George Henry Storie, of Thames Ditton and Camberwell, and formerly rector of Stow, Essex, daughter of the late lieut.-colonel Chalmers. In Great Pulteney-street, Samuel Jackson, esq. 7. In Montagu-street, Portmansquare, aged 85, Andrew Allen, esq. In Upper Charlotte-street, Fitzroy-square, after a very long and harassing illness, John Young, esq. Mezzotinto engraver to his majesty; keeper of the British Institution, and honorary secretary of the Artists' General Benevolent Institution. As an artist, in his own depart ment he possessed first-rate talents. One of his best works is a mezzotinto print, from a picture by Mortimer, representing the memorable contest between Broughton and Stevenson, sir William Wyndham's coachman. His outline engravings of the Stafford and other distinguished collections of paintings, are also highly creditable to the skill of their delineator. He was engaged, by the permission of his majesty, in a similar work on the pictures at Carlton-palace. 8. The rev. Peter Elmsley, D.D. He was born in 1773, and educated first at a school at Hampstead, and afterwards at Westminster. His extraordinary proficiency in classical learning caused him to be placed in the sixth or higher form at this seminary; but he was precluded by his age from becoming a member of the foundation. He went to Oxford, where he was unsuccessful in an attempt to obtain a fellowship at Merton. He left the university of Oxford with none of its rewards or emoluments, but with a reputation for deep and extensive learning, which no under-graduate had for many years obtained. Mr. Elmsley took orders not long afterwards, proceeded M. A. in 1797, and was presented in 1798, by W. J. H. Blair, esq. to Little Horkesley, a small chapelry in Essex, which he retained to his death, but the whole emoluments of which, when he ceased to reside there, he bestowed on his curate. He never had any other preferment in the church. On the death of his uncle, Mr. Peter Elmsley, the wellknown bookseller, he inherited an independent fortune, which left him at liberty to devote his mind to those literary researches which were its resource and delight, especially to Greek philology, which he soon chose as his favourite province. The events in the life of a man of letters, thus independent in fortune, and tranquil in character, cannot be expected to furnish much information. Mr. Elmsley resided for some time at Edinburgh, and became intimately acquainted with the distinguished young men who set on foot the Edinburgh Review in 1802. To this publication he contributed several articles on Greek literature; the Critique on Heyne's Homer in the 4th number, on Schweighauser's Athenæus in the 5th, on Bloomfield's Prometheus in the 35th, and on Porson's Hecuba, in the 37th. In the Quarterly Review he wrote an article on Markland's Supplices, and some others. The only known instance of his taking up the pen for the purpose of publication, on any but a philological subject, was in a critique of lord Clarendon's Religion and Policy, in the 38th number of the Edinburgh Review. His more ostensible contributions to classical literature are well known: an edition of the Acharnanes in 1809; of the dipus Tyrannus in 1811; of the Heraclidæ in 1815; of the Medea in 1818; of the Bacchæ in 1821; and lastly of the Edipus Coloneus in 1823. These publications established his fame throughout Europe as a judicious critic and consummate DEATHS.-MARCH. master of the Greek language. Aware of the uncertainty of conjecture, he was always diffident of correcting the text without authority; which is the more remarkable, because, of one at least of the dramatists who chiefly occupied his attention, Sophocles, he entertained a very low opinion of the existing manuscripts, which he believed to have been all transcribed from, or corrected by, a Codex Archetypus, itself written about the 7th century, when the purity of the Athenian idiom had ceased to be understood. This judgment, however, was not hastily formed; no man submitted more patiently to the drudgery of collation, or was more anxious to avail himself of all the assistance which the great European repositories of manuscripts afford. It was in a considerable degree for this purpose that Mr. Elmsley visited France and Italy several times, and spent the entire winter of 1818 in the Laurentian library at Florence. Mr. Elmsley lived a few years, after his return from Edinburgh, in Gower-street; but in 1807 took a house at St. Mary Cray; sacrificing the allurements of London society for the sake of his mother and some other relatives, to whom a country residence was more eligible. He continued in the midst of a polished and hospitable neighbourhood, to whom his excellence of disposition and lively wit rendered him the object of high esteem and attachment, and in the enjoyment of a learned leisure, till 1816, when he set out on a tour to Italy. Familiar in an extraordinary degree with modern history, and all the information subsidiary to it, and endowed with a minute curiosity as to all the details of such subjects, he felt a strong relish for foreign travel. Seldom with a companion, still more seldom with a servant, he wandered through celebrated scenes, adding continually to his immense stores of accumulated knowledge, rather indeed through the eye than the ear; for he associated little with foreigners, notwithstanding his accurate acquaintance with the French and Italian languages. He returned to England in 1817, and then took up his abode at Oxford, which he now determined to make his permanent residence. In 1818 he went again to Italy; and after returning in the spring of 1819, was easily persuaded to accept a sort of commission from our government, jointly with sir Humphrey Davy, to superintend the development of some of the papyri found at Herculaneum. It will be remembered, that more sanguine hopes were entertained than the experiment realized, that the skill of the chemist might overcome the obstacles which had hitherto prevented those interesting volumes from being unrolled. But as it was of high importance that no time should be unnecessarily wasted in an operation which must, on any supposition, be tedious, Mr. E. was relied upon to direct the choice of manuscripts, as soon as, by partially laying them open, the contents and character of each should be determined. The experiment, as is well known, proved wholly abortive; and Mr. Elmsley returned to England in 1820; but having imprudently exposed himself too much to the heat, he was seized with a severe fever at Turin, from which, it is probable, the subsequent failure of his constitution was to be dated. Though for some time nothing occurred materially to alarm his friends, he was more frequently indisposed than before; and from the date of a tour he took in Germany, during the summer of 1823, the apparent commencement of an organic disease of the heart might be traced, which ultimately deprived the world of this eminent scholar. After his return from Italy he lived almost wholly at Oxford; he took the degree of doctor in divinity, became principal of Alban-hall, and Cainden professor of history in 1823, and was expected to succeed to the next vacant canonry of Christ-church. DEATHS.-MARCH. Though Dr. Elmsley was chiefly known to the public as a Greek critic, it was by no means in this department of learning that his abilities and acquirements were most extraordinary in the eyes of his friends; and some of them have frequently regretted that he should have confined himself, in what he meant for the world, to so narrow a walk as that of collating manuscripts, and attempting to restore the text of a few tragedies. He certainly did not over-value the importance of this very limited province of philology, which the conspicuous success of one great scholar has rendered perhaps too exclusively fashionable among those who aim at a reputation for classical learning; yet, from whatever cause, he was content to pass several years in a species of labour, which, to say the least, did not call into action the full powers of his mind, or impart to others his immense stores of general knowledge. He was probably the best ecclesiastical scholar in England; more conversant than any one with all the history of religious opinion, and with all the details, however trifling, connected with the several churches of Christendom. Few priests of that of Rome could better know their own discipline and ceremonies, which he could explain with a distinctness and accuracy altogether surprising, and characteristic of his retentive memory, and the clear arrangement of his knowledge. He was almost equally at home in the civil institutions and usages of different countries, and in every species of historical information, never pretending to knowledge that he did not possess, but rarely found deficient in the power of answering any question. This comprehensive ness and exactitude of learning was united to a sound and clear judgment, and an habitual impartiality. 9. At Stoke Newington, in the 82nd year of her age, Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld, daughter of the late rev. John Aikin, D. D., and widow of the rev. Rochemont Barbauld. This distinguished lady, whose fame was second to none among the female writers of her country, was born at Kibworth, in the county of Leicester, on June 20th, 1743. She was indebted to her father for the solid foundation of a literary and classical education. In the year 1756, she accompanied her family to Warrington, in Lancashire, where her father was appointed one of the tutors of a dissenting academy. She published, in 1772, a volume of poems, which immediately gave her a place in the first rank of living poets. The next year, in conjunction with her brother, the late John Aikin, M. D., she gave to the world a small but choice collection of miscellaneous pieces in prose. On her marriage, in 1774, she went to reside at Palgrave in Suffolk, where her " Early Lessons and Hymns in prose for children," were composed-master pieces in the art of early instruction-monuments at once of her genius, and of the condescending benevolence which presided over its exercise. In 1785, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld quitted Palgrave, and after a tour on the continent, and some months passed in London, they settled at Hampstead. Some pamphlets on public topics, printed anonymously, but marked for hers, by a style of almost unrivalled brilliancy and animation, and a poetic epistle to Mr. Wilberforce on his exertions for the abolition of the slave trade, were the principal efforts of her pen during the succeeding years. In 1802, she and Mr. Barbauld fixed their abode at Stoke Newington, whither they were attracted by her affection for her brother, and desire of enjoying his daily society. A selection from the Guardian, Spectator, and Tatler, introduced by an elegant essay; another from the manuscript correspondence of Richardson, with a life of the author and a view of his writings prefixed; and a collection of the best English DEATHS.-MARCH. novels, with biographical and critical prefaces, served in succession to amuse her leisure. A higher effort of her powers was, the poem entitled Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, which appeared early in the ensuing year. This was the last of her separate publications ; but she continued occasionally to exercise her poetical powers, which she retained in undiminished vigour, nearly to the latest period of her life. She sunk by a gradual decay, without any severe bodily suffering, and with perfect resignation and composure of mind. Mrs. Barbauld has left behind her many unpublished pieces, both in verse and prose. 10. At Knightsbridge, aged 2, Mary Ann Gregory, daughter, and on the 15th, aged 3, Thos. Wycliffe, third son of R. M. Stapleton, esq. Edmund Hay, infant son of Daniel Gurney, esq. and lady Harriet Gurney. 11. William Owen, esq. R. A. After a protracted illness of nearly six years, he was hurried out of the world by having laudanum administered to him in mistake for other medicine. Mr. Owen was a native of Wales, and came to London with the late Richard P. Knight, esq. The eminence which he attained in his profession was the natural result of his unwearied diligence, as he always endeavoured to do his best. As a portrait painter he was of the first class. His style was bold and vigorous, his arrangements often happy, and his eye for colour excellent. His accompaniments generally displayed the hand of a master; but his drawing was feeble when employed upon the heads and hands. That he did not succeed in displaying the graces of female expression must be attributed to this deficiency. In his academic duties he was greatly respected, and beloved by the students for the liberal manner in which he communicated his advice. He left a widow and an only son, the rev. William Owen, to deplore his loss. Mr. Owen was originally a pupil of Catton's. His funeral was a private one, though attended by the president of the academy, and by the old friends of the deceased, Westmacott, Phillips, and Thompson. 12. At his seat, Fir-hill, near Droxford, Hants, aged 77, Charles Powell Hamilton, esq. admiral of the red. He was son of lord Anne Hamilton (so named from his godmother queen Anne), third and youngest son of James 4th duke of Hamilton, by his second wife Elizabeth, daughter and sole heir of Digby, lord Gerrard of Bromley; his mother was Mary daughter and sole heir of Powell, esq. At Leamington, in his 47th year, the rev. Robert Bland, curate of Kenilworth. He was of Pembroke college, Cambridge, where he proceeded B.A. 1802. His published works are, Edwy and Elgiva, Poems, 8vo. 1808. The Four Slaves of Cythera, a poetical Romance, 8vo. 1809. A Collection of the most beautiful Poems of the Minor Poets of Greece, with Notes and Illustrations, and an admirable Preface, 8vo. 1813. A Translation of the Memoirs, &c. of Baron de Grimm and Diderot, in conjunction with Miss Plumtre, 2 vols. 8vo. 1813. At Knaresborough, Thomas Prest, esq. of Burton House, Mashan, Yorkshire, in the 54th year of his age. 14. In his 22nd year, W. S. Tyner, esq. of St. John's college, Cambridge, son of the rev. W. Tyner, vicar of Compton, and rector of Upmarden, Sussex. 15. At Goodneston Farm, lady Bridges, relict of the late sir Brook Bridges, bart. At Coham, Devon, in the 62nd year of his age, the rev. William Holland Coham, M. A. rector of Halwell. 16 At Rye, Sussex, major Richard Hay, of the Bengal native infantry, aged 59. |