Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 39.djvu/313



 at Madras. At the request of the new governor, Lord Macartney, he took command of the expedition against the Dutch settlements, which captured Negapatam, after a four weeks' siege, on 12 Nov. 1781, and afterwards returned home. He became a major-general on the English establishment from 26 Nov. 1782. After his return he received the sinecure appointment of barrack-master-general in North Britain. He was appointed colonel of the 42nd highlanders (Black Watch) on 1 June 1787, became a lieutenant-general in 1793, and general on 1 Jan. 1798.

Munro spent his latter years in enlarging and improving his estate at Novar. He was returned again and again for the Inverness burghs, which he represented altogether for thirty-four years, and he was during that time a steady supporter of the government of the day. He was more than once provost of Inverness and other towns. In his prime Munro was a robust, handsome man, a firm but humane disciplinarian, and, although not a great tactician, a brave, enterprising, and successful soldier. In his later years he proved himself a beneficent and public-spirited country gentleman. He accepted the Chiltern Hundreds in 1801. He was defeated for Inverness at the general election of 1802, and petitioned, but the petition was withdrawn. Munro died at Novar on 27 Dec. 1805, aged 79 (inscription on tombstone at Novar). He was married and had a daughter, Jean, who died in 1803, having married in 1798 Lieutenant-colonel (afterwards Sir Ronald) [q. v.]

Munro was succeeded in the Novar property by his brother, Sir Alexander Munro, kt., many years consul-general at Madrid, and afterwards a commissioner of excise, who died at Ramsgate on 26 Aug. 1809, aged 83 (see Scots Mag. 1809, p. 416). Alexander Munro's official correspondence in Spain is among the British Museum Add. MSS. (period 1771-8, 24167-72; period 1785-7, 28060-2). He was succeeded by his son, by whom the collection of pictures now at Novar was formed. At his death in 1865 Novar passed into the female line, now represented by the Munro-Fergusons of Raith, Kirkcaldy, Fifeshire (see, Landed Gentry, 1888 ed. vol. ii.)



MUNRO, HUGH ANDREW JOHNSTONE (1819–1885), classical scholar and critic, born at Elgin 19 Oct. 1819, was the natural son of Penelope Forbes and H. A. J. Munro of Novar, Ross-shire, the owner of a famous collection of pictures. His early youth was spent at Elgin. He was sent to Shrewsbury school in August 1833, and took a good place from the first. In 1836 Dr. [q. v.] succeeded Dr. [q. v.] as headmaster of Shrewsbury; and Munro himself has put on record (in his memoir of [q. v.], prefixed to the latter's posthumous edition of Aristotle's ‘Rhetoric’) the powerful influence which the enthusiasm and scholarship of their teacher exercised upon the sixth form. In October 1838 he entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, as a pensioner, was elected scholar in 1840, and university Craven scholar in 1841. In 1842 he graduated as second classic, and gained the first chancellor's medal. He was elected a fellow of his college in 1843, and after some residence in Paris, Florence, and Berlin, took holy orders and began to lecture on classical subjects at Trinity. From this time until his death, Trinity College was his permanent home, though he paid many visits to the continent, and generally spent some part of the summer in Scotland.

He first attracted attention in Cambridge by his lectures on Aristotle; and his first publication was a paper, read before the Philosophical Society 11 Feb. 1850, in which he reviewed with remarkable power and no less remarkable frankness Whewell's interpretation of Aristotle's account of inductive reasoning. Five years later, in the ‘Journal of Sacred and Classical Philology,’ he published an important paper on the same author, in which he maintained the Eudemian authorship of the fifth, sixth, and seventh books of the Nicomachean ethics. The theory was adopted by Grant in his edition; and most English scholars are now agreed that Munro proved his point. But the main work of his life was to be done in other fields.

Early in life he turned his attention to the poem of Lucretius: between 1849 and 1851 he collated all the Lucretian manuscripts in the Vatican and Laurentian libraries, and examined those at Leyden. It was known on what subject he was working; and his friends supposed, when Lachmann's critical edition appeared in 1850, that Munro would find