Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/621

 amusement and devastating irony were obnoxious. With but a smattering of Latin and Greek, his rare intuition, wide reading, and full memory distinguished him in any company. He had a good knowledge of French literature and was a fair Italian scholar, pronouncing both languages like a native; was a good raconteur and mimic, and a loud laugher. Although he truly loved romance, his solid figure, deliberate movements, and searching common sense seemed unromantic, and gave the impression of ease and indolence—and that was not untrue to his nature, for he would have preferred a world that was not always calling for the delicate adjustment of his serious intelligence.

Among his musical remains are The Yattendon Hymnal, 1895–1899, edited with the present poet laureate, his lifelong friend, with whom he lived for years in London and afterwards constantly visited at Yattendon, where he sang in the choir and set music for it. There are also church settings and compositions by him in Musica Antiquata (1907–1908, 1913). The rare combination of delicate aesthetic sensibility with complete scholarly and artistic sympathy identifies the best of these simple four-part polyphonic settings with the workmanship of the original masters. He was called upon to serve on the committee for the revision of Hymns Ancient and Modern, but retired after two or three meetings through dissatisfaction with the quality of the work.

He married in 1894 Julia Mary, daughter of Stephen Olding. To her knowledge of German he owed much in his antiquarian research. He left no children.

 WRIGHT, WILLIAM ALDIS (1831–1914), Shakespearian and Biblical scholar, born at Beccles 1 August 1831, was the second son of George Wright, baptist minister there, by his second wife, Elizabeth Higham, sister of Thomas Higham [q.v.], the engraver. After education at the Northgate house academy and from 1847 at the Fauconberge grammar school, Beccles, he was admitted in 1849 to Trinity College, Cambridge, and was eighteenth wrangler in 1854. He taught in a school at Wimbledon in 1855, returned to Cambridge, and, on the removal of the religious tests, graduated B.A. in 1858 and M.A. in 1861. His first publication was an essay on Herrick in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine for September 1856. He found regular employment on (Sir) William Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (1860–1863), and made his name as a scholar by his contributions to it, by his edition of Bacon's Essays (1862), and by the part which he played with Henry Bradshaw [q.v.] in the exposure of the falsehoods of Constantine Simonides [Guardian, 3 September 1862, 26 January and 11 November 1863]. In 1863 he was appointed librarian of Trinity College, but could not be elected fellow till October 1878, when the university commission of 1877 had removed the last disabilities of dissenters. He was senior bursar from June 1870 (when he resigned the librarianship) to December 1895, and vice-master from February 1888 till his death at Cambridge, 19 May 1914. He had occupied the same rooms in Nevile's Court since 1865. Although one of the great figures in the university, he took no part latterly in its politics, and he neither taught nor lectured. Few undergraduates ventured to speak to him, and even the younger fellows of his college were kept at a distance by the austere precision of his manner. His old-fashioned courtesy made him a genial host, but his circle of chosen friends was small.

Wright's edition (Golden Treasury series) of Bacon's Essays foreshadowed his later work in the accuracy of its text and the concise learning of its notes, and remains a model edition of an English classic. He insisted on keeping the old spelling and punctuation, and was the first to point out emphatically that editors of Elizabethan texts must expect variations in different copies of the same issue. He had used ten copies of the text which he reprinted, and found that some of the sheets were in three stages. He thus anticipated much that is supposed to be recent in editorial methods. He showed that the older punctuation was ‘rhetorical and not grammatical’ in a memorandum (unpublished) On the use of the Comma in the Annexed Book (i.e. the copy of the Prayer Book annexed to the Act of Uniformity of 1662), which he presented in 1894 to the Oxford and Cambridge University Presses.

In 1863, after the publication of the first volume of the Cambridge Shakespeare, Wright succeeded John Glover as joint-editor with William George Clark [q.v.], and brought out the remaining eight volumes from 1863 to 1866. He was solely responsible for the second edition (1891–1893), which remains the great monument of his industry and accuracy. But he was not responsible for its plan. In conversation he admitted the 595