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 a comparatively small district of about two thousand souls. Soon afterwards he joined the staff of the 'Times,' and to the columns of that newspaper he contributed some two thousand leading articles between August 1873 and December 1896 upon a great variety of topics, literary, political, and financial. Some of these were reprinted in 1898, after his death, in a volume entitled 'Studies on many Subjects,' which also includes a selection of articles written for the 'Westminster Review' between 1861 and 1866. To these literary labours he added an edition with notes of Bacon's 'Essays' (1890) and of the 'Table-talk of John Selden' (1892). He resigned his living in December 1893, and removed to The Gables, Abingdon, 'to be near enough to the Bodleian for study, and not near enough to Oxford for society.' Here he devoted himself to literary pursuits; but as his health failed he sought from time to time the milder climate of the south of France. He died at Biarritz on 7 Feb. 1897, and was buried at that place two days later. He was a man of engaging social qualities, a good raconteur with a caustic wit. His literary style was lucid and terse.

He married, on 12 April 1871, Edith Claudia, daughter of the Rev. Claudius Sandys, military chaplain at Bombay, and granddaughter of Colonel Sandys of Llanarth, Cornwall. He left no issue.

 RICHARDSON, BENJAMIN WARD (1828–1896), physician, only son of Benjamin Richardson and Mary Ward his wife, was born at Somerby in Leicestershire on 31 Oct. 1828, and was educated by the Rev. W. Young Nutt at the Barrow Hill school in the same county. Being destined by the deathbed wish of his mother for the medical profession, his studies were always directed to that end, and he was early apprenticed to Henry Hudson, the surgeon at Somerby. He entered Anderson's University (now Anderson's College), Glasgow, in 1847, but a severe attack of famine fever, caught while he was a pupil at St. Andrews Lying-in Hospital, interrupted his studies, and led him to become an assistant, first to Thomas Browne of Saffron Walden in Essex, and afterwards to Edward Dudley Hudson at Littlebury, Narborough, near Leicester, who was the elder brother of his former master.

In 1850 he was admitted a licentiate of the Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow, becoming faculty lecturer in 1877, and being enrolled a fellow on 3 June 1878. In 1854 he was admitted M.A. and M.D. of St. Andrews, where he afterwards became a member of the university court, assessor of the general council, and in 1877 an honorary LL.D. He was a founder and for thirty-five times in succession the president of the St. Andrews Medical Graduates' Association. He was admitted a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1856, and was elected a fellow in 1865, serving the office of materia medica lecturer in 1866. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1867, and delivered the Croonian lecture in 1873 on ' The Muscular Irritability after Systemic Death.'

In 1849 he left Mr. Hudson and joined Dr. Robert Willis of Barnes, well known as the editor of the works of William Harvey, and librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (1828-45). Richardson lived at Mortlake, and about this time became a member of 'Our Club,' where he met Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Hepworth Dixon, Mark Lemon, John Doran, and George Cruikshank, of whose will he became an executor.

Richardson moved to London in 1853-4, and took a house at 12 Hinde Street, whence he moved to 25 Manchester Square. In 1854 he was appointed physician to the Blenheim Street Dispensary, and in 1856 to the Royal Infirmary for Diseases of the Chest in the City Road. He was also physician to the Metropolitan Dispensary (1856), to the Marylebone and to the Margaret Street Dispensaries (1856), and in 1892 he became physician to the London Temperance Hospital. For many years he was physician to the Newspaper Press Fund and to the Royal Literary Fund, of the committee of which he was long an active member. In 1854 he became lecturer upon forensic medicine at the Grosvenor Place School of Medicine, where he was afterwards appointed the first lecturer on public hygiene, posts which he resigned in 1857 for the lectureship on physiology. He remained dean of the school until 1865, when it was sold and, with all the other buildings in the old Tattersall's yard, demolished. Richardson was also a lecturer about this time at the College of Dentists, then occupying a part of the Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street.

In 1854 Richardson was awarded the