Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 33.djvu/272

 1668). Much was probably due to his method in teaching. We find incidentally that he encouraged a knowledge of music as ‘a great help to pronunciation and judgment’ (, Chorus Vatum, v. 542).



LIMERICK, (1708–1845). [See .]

LIMPUS, RICHARD (1824–1875), founder of the College of Organists, born 10 Sept. 1824, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and became organist successively of Brentford, St. Andrew Undershaft, and St. Michael's, Cornhill. He was a highly educated musician, and composed some minor sacred and secular music; but he is noted as the founder, in 1864, of the College of Organists, of which he was secretary till his death in London 15 March 1875. The institution, established with the view of providing a central organisation of the profession of organist, together with a system of examination and certificates, is now the most influential of its kind in the country, and Limpus did much to give it this position.



LINACRE, THOMAS (1460?–1524), physician and classical scholar, was born about 1460, most probably at Canterbury. Caius, a good authority, distinctly calls him Cantuariensis (Hist. Cantab. Acad. ii. 126, 1574;, Bibliotheca Britannico-Hibernica, 1748, p. 482). Holinshed, Weever, and Fuller give Derby as his birthplace, but without authority, and his supposed kinship with the Linacre family of Linacre Hall, Derbyshire, is equally uncertain. He received his first education at Canterbury, probably at the school of the monastery of Christ Church, under William de Selling (or Tilly), afterwards prior, a scholar who had travelled in Italy and acquired a knowledge of Greek, and whose learned tastes had a great influence upon his pupil. At the age of twenty, as is supposed, Linacre was sent to Oxford, to what college is not known, but in 1484 he was elected fellow of All Souls. In the college register he is not described as of founder's kin; and may therefore be regarded as lacking that qualification. At Oxford it is very probable that he received instruction in Greek from Cornelio Vitelli, then resident there and believed to have been the first teacher of Greek in England (, Anglica Historia, Basel, 1570, p. 618). He became also an intimate friend of two scholars, William Grocyn and William Latimer, who were well known as students and afterwards teachers of the Greek language.

Subsequently, about 1485–6, Linacre went to Italy in the suite of his old tutor, Selling, who was ambassador from Henry VII to the pope (, De Scriptoribus Britannicis, 1709, ii. 483). He is said to have accompanied the embassy as far as Bologna, where he was introduced to Angelo Poliziano, but then left it, and went to Florence, where he was permitted by Lorenzo de' Medici to share the instructions given by Poliziano and Demetrius Chalcondylas to the two young princes, Piero and Giovanni de' Medici. The latter became pope under the name of Leo X, and was in after years not unmindful of this association with Linacre. After a year spent in Florence he passed to Rome, where, while reading a manuscript of Plato in the Vatican Library, he formed the acquaintance of another great scholar, Hermolaus Barbarus. It is probable that from Barbarus Linacre acquired a bias to the study of Aristotle, Dioscorides, Pliny, and other medical writers, in whom the Italian scholar, though not himself a physician, took great interest ( Descriptio Britanniæ; Elogia Virorum, etc., per Georgium Lilium, Basel, 1578, pp. 40 et seq.).

From Rome Linacre proceeded to Venice, where he made the acquaintance of Aldus Manutius Romanus, the printer, who received him kindly, and on two occasions expressed a high opinion of his learning and scholarship; viz. in the dedication to Albertus Pius, prince of Carpi, of Linacre's translation of ‘Proclus de Sphæra’ (Astronomici Veteres, Venice, 1499); and the dedication of the second volume of the first edition of Aristotle in Greek, dated February 1497, in which Aldus refers to ‘Thomas Anglicus’ as a witness of the pains bestowed on the printing of Greek manuscripts.

At Padua Linacre graduated as M.D., and probably spent some time in medical study. The memory of the brilliant disputation which he sustained for his degree against the senior physicians is preserved by Richard Pace in his ‘De Fructû ex Doctrina,’ Basel, 1517, p. 76.

Linacre's next stay in Italy was in Vicenza, where he studied under Nicolaus Leonicenus, a celebrated physician and scholar,