Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 34.djvu/203

 The first part appeared in 1857, and the fifth, completing the first volume, in 1868. Lowe paid repeated visits to Madeira and the neighbouring islands, in order to complete the work, but he did not publish more than the first part of the second volume, which was issued in 1872. In April 1874 he set out for another visit to Madeira on board the Liberia, but the ship foundered with all hands off the Scilly Isles about the 13th of the month. The Rosaceous genus Lowea of Dr. Lindley is now absorbed in Hulthemia.



LOWE, ROBERT, (1811–1892), politician, born at Bingham, Nottinghamshire, 4 Dec. 1811, was second son of Robert Lowe, rector of that parish, and prebendary of Southwell (died at Bingham, 23 Jan. 1845, aged 65), who married in July 1805, Ellen, second daughter and coheiress of the Rev. Reginald Pyndar, rector of Madresfield in Worcestershire. She died at Great Malvern, 15 Nov. 1852, aged 68. In 1825 Lowe entered Winchester College as a commoner, and was contemporary there with Roundell Palmer, now lord Selborne, and Edward, afterwards lord Cardwell, both of whom were subsequently his colleagues in office. Dr. W. G. Ward, his subsequent antagonist at Oxford, was also a schoolfellow. Later in life he confessed that the last two years of his schooldays had been passed mainly in reading some ‘standard and sterling English books,’ a circumstance to which he attributed much of his success in life, but he made sufficient use of his classics to become the fourth prefect in the top form of the college, and to be worthy of immediate admission as a freshman to the most distinguished set of undergraduates at the university. On 16 June 1829 Lowe matriculated at University College, Oxford. During his undergraduate days he spoke often at the Union, and divided the palm of oratory with Ward. An amusing account is printed in Bishop Charles Wordsworth's ‘Annals of his Early Life’ (pp. 85–6), of a debate which took place in May 1831, when Lowe and Tait, the future archbishop of Canterbury, defended the whig ministry, but were both promptly dismissed by the youthful chronicler as ‘Nobodies.’ Another debate at the Union, in which Lowe took part, is chronicled in Sir Francis Doyle's ‘Reminiscences,’ pp. 115–16. Lowe graduated B.A. in 1833, taking a first class in classics and a second class in mathematics, and proceeded M.A. in 1836. For some years he remained at Oxford as a private tutor, and in 1835 he was elected to a fellowship at Magdalen College, but this he only held for a year, for on 26 March 1836 he married Georgiana, second daughter of George Orred, of Aigburth House, in Lancashire. Popular opinion picked him out as the most efficient coach at the university, but this tribute of praise was withheld from him as an examiner, as he was ‘too hasty in his decisions.’ Though his eyesight was defective he ‘might often be met with on the water, pulling a lusty stroke oar while his wife steered’ (Recollections by the Rev. Henry Robinson, D.D., in Reminiscences of Oxford, Oxford Hist. Soc., 1892, p. 350). In 1838 he applied for the chair of Greek at the university of Glasgow, but Dr. Edmund L. Lushington was preferred to him, and this, as he told the citizens in a speech at Glasgow in 1872, was the greatest disappointment which he ever experienced. In the ecclesiastical dispute over Newman's tract, No. 90, which rent Oxford in twain, Lowe took keen interest. He issued in 1841 an anonymous pamphlet called ‘The Articles construed by themselves,’ in which he contended with great emphasis that the only legitimate interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles must be found in the articles themselves. Ward, his old antagonist at the Union, replied with ‘A few more words in support of No. 90,’ and Lowe retorted with ‘Observations suggested by a few more words,’ and to this he put his name. While coaching others at the university, Lowe himself studied for the law. He was admitted a student of Lincoln's Inn on 1 May 1835, and was called to the bar at that inn on 28 Jan. 1842.

In the same year he went to Sydney in Australia, where he practised in the law courts for some time without much success. On the nomination of Sir [q. v.], he sat in the legislative council for New South Wales from November 1843, and, by the vigour of his speeches on financial and educational questions, soon became one of the leaders of opinion in the colony. His eloquence secured the abolition of imprisonment for debt, and the adoption in 1846, after he had pressed the matter in vain during several sessions, of a resolution for the formation of a national board of education. By this time Lowe had differed from Sir George Gipps on public and private grounds, and his sense of independence led him to resign his nomination seat. He was, however, again returned as the elected representative for the district of St. Vincent, and during the next session denounced with vehemence the monopoly by which tens of thousands of acres had passed into the hands of a few isolated squatters. At the general election of 1848 he was returned after a severe struggle