Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 3.djvu/256

 newspaper and with the financial support of William Rathbone, M.P. [q. v. Suppl. II], she purchased in 1869 Avenue House, High Street, Peckham, and with her two younger sisters, in spite of public opposition and prejudice, took there from the streets or the workhouses waifs and strays from the ages of three to sixteen. Fifty girls from Kirkdale industrial school, Liverpool, were soon put under her care; they were trained in domestic economy and went through courses of general and religious instruction. At Niagara, Canada, Miss Rye also acquired a building which she called 'Our Western Home.' It was opened on 1 Dec. 1869. To this house Miss Rye drafted the children from Peckham, and after further training they were distributed in Canada as domestic servants among respectable families. The first party left England in October 1869. Poor law children were subsequently received at Peckham from St. George's, Hanover Square, Wolverhampton, Bristol, Reading, and other towns. By 1891 Miss Rye had found homes in Canada for some five hundred children. She personally accompanied each batch of emigrants, and constantly visited the children already settled there. The work was continued with great success for over a quarter of a century, and did much to diminish the vicious habits and the stigma of pauperism. Lord Shaftesbury remained a consistent supporter, and in 1884 the duke of Argyll, then governor-general of Canada, warmly commended the results of Miss Rye's pioneer system, which Dr. Bamardo [q. v. Suppl. II] and others subsequently adopted and extended.

In 1895, owing to the continuous strain, Miss Rye transferred the two institutions in Peckham and Niagara with their funds to the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society. That society, which was founded in 1891, still carries on her work. In her farewell report of 1895 she stated that 4000 English and Scottish children then in Canada had been sent out from her home in England. She retired with her sister Elizabeth to 'Baconsthorpe,' Hemel Hempstead, where she spent the remainder of her life. There she died, after four years' suffering, of intestinal cancer on 12 Nov. 1903, and was buried in the churchyard. Of powerful physique and resolute character, Miss Rye cherished strong religious convictions, and her dislike of Roman Catholicism often led her into controversy. She received a civil list pension of 101. in 1871.

 RYE, WILLIAM BRENCHLEY (1818–1901), keeper of printed books in the British Museum, born at Rochester on 26 Jan. 1818, was the younger son of Arthur Rye, a medical practitioner in that city. He was educated at the Rochester and Chatham Classical and Mathematical School, but the death of his father in 1832 left him with slender means, and in 1834 he came to London and entered the office of a solicitor, where he met John Winter Jones [q. v.], afterwards principal librarian of the British Museum, who in 1838, soon after his own appointment, obtained for him a subordinate post in the library there. His diligence and efficiency gained for him the good opinion of Sir Anthony Panizzi, then keeper, who in 1839 secured his appointment as a supernumerary assistant, and in 1844 he was placed on the permanent staff. On the bequest to the nation in 1846 of the splendid library of Thomas Grenville, Rye was entrusted with its removal to the British Museum and afterwards with its arrangement there. At a later date he selected and arranged the library of reference in the new reading-room opened in 1857, and he devised the plan showing the placing of the books which is still in use. He became an assistant - keeper in the department of printed books in 1857, and succeeded Thomas Watts in the keepership in 1869, but failing health and eyesight compelled him to retire in July 1875. The Weigel sale of block-books and incunabula in 1872, at which some important purchases were made, was the chief event of his brief term of office.

Rye's tastes were antiquarian rather than literary, and he possessed a great store of information relating to old English literature and to mediæval architecture and antiquities. He also practised etching. He edited for the Hakluyt Society in 1851, with an introduction and notes, Richard Hakluyt's translation of Fernando de Soto's Portuguese narrative of the 'Discovery and Conquest of Terra Florida,' but his principal work was 'England as seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First' (1865), a collection of the narratives of 