Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 13.djvu/331

 Payments for the services of Cure and his father on these works occur in Sir Julius Cæsar's papers (Brit. Mus. Lansd. MS. 164). In 1613 Cure signed an agreement to erect a monument in Cranford Church, Middlesex, to Sir Roger Aston, master of the great wardrobe to James I, his two wives, and his children; this agreement still exists (Gent. Mag. 1800, lxx. 104). In 1618 he signed another agreement to erect a monument in the Abbey Church at Bath to James Montague, bishop of Winchester, for 200l.; this agreement also exists, and it is noteworthy that he spells his name in his signature as Cuer (, History from Marble, i. 155, Camd. Soc. Publ.) Cure worked under Inigo Jones at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, and continued to hold the office of master-mason until his death in 1632, when he was succeeded by Nicolas Stone [q. v.] On 4 Aug. 1632 he was buried in the church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Southwark. Francis Meres, in his ‘Palladis Tamia’ (published 1598), says: ‘As Lysippus, Praxiteles, and Pyrgoteles were excellent engravers, so have we these engravers, Rogers, Christopher Switzer, and Cure.’ It is no doubt Cornelius Cure who is thus extolled. It would appear that Cure was of Dutch origin, as in 1576 there exists a payment to ‘W. Cure, Duchemane graver,’ for making a clay figure of the tartar, lately brought to England by Sir Martin Frobisher (, England as seen by Foreigners, p. 205).



CURETON, WILLIAM (1808–1864), Syriac scholar, was born in 1808 at Westbury, Shropshire, and educated at the Newport grammar school. The death of his father having greatly reduced the means of the family, Cureton determined to spare his mother expense by proceeding to Christ Church, Oxford, as a servitor. He took a Careswell exhibition from his school, and was thus enabled to support himself. He entered in 1828, took his B.A. degree in 1831 (not in 1830, as all his biographies state), his M.A. in 1833, and eventually added the degrees of B.C.L. and D.C.L. by accumulation in 1858. Meanwhile he had taken deacon's orders in 1831, and was ordained priest in 1832. His first curacy was at Oddington in Oxfordshire, and Dean Gaisford, who was much attached to the industrious student, appointed him one of the chaplains of Christ Church. In 1840 he was select preacher to the university. In 1847 he became a chaplain in ordinary to the queen, and finally Lord John Russell presented him in 1849 to a canonry at Westminster, which he held, together with the adjoining rectory of St. Margaret's, until his death (17 June 1864), which was accelerated by a railway accident in the preceding year from which he never entirely rallied. His devotion to oriental learning began at an early age. He had hardly taken his bachelor's degree when he began Arabic, and his appointment to the post of sub-librarian at the Bodleian Library afforded him ample opportunities for continuing the study. He was at the Bodleian from 1834 to 1837, and then was transferred to the British Museum, where he became assistant-keeper of manuscripts, in succession to Sir F. Madden, promoted. His first duty at the Museum, where he was the only oriental scholar in the department, was to prepare a classified catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts, and the first part of this laborious work, comprising christian writings and treatises of Mohammedan theology, jurisprudence, and history, all minutely described in Latin, appeared in 1846. The materials for the continuation of the catalogue were also prepared. But a new study had already engaged Cureton's attention. During his official occupation at the British Museum immense additions had been made to the collection of Syriac manuscripts. When he entered the department these numbered about eighty; but the accession of numerous manuscripts of the highest importance from the Nitrian monasteries, which were purchased and brought over partly by the mediation of Dr. Tattam in 1841 and 1843, raised the total to nearly six hundred. Cureton, who knew nothing of Syriac when he came to the department, set himself zealously to work to conquer the not very serious difficulties of the language, and to set in order and classify the new acquisitions from the Nitrian valley. His labours while drawing up an outline catalogue were amply rewarded by the discovery of many manuscripts of the highest interest, of which he gave an account in the ‘Quarterly Review,’ 1845, together with an interesting narrative of the manner in which they were discovered and purchased. He had afterwards occasion to review his official labours in his evidence before the commission on the constitution of the British Museum, from the minutes of which some of the foregoing statements have been derived. The most celebrated discovery which Cureton made among the Syriac manuscripts in the Nitrian collection was that of the famous Epistles of St. Ignatius to Polycarp, the Ephesians and the Romans, which he maintained to be the