Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/124

 and buried before the altar of St. Mary in the nave, according to a desire which he is said to have expressed in his lifetime (, i. 26). His coffin was opened in 1787, and his remains were identified by an inscription on a piece of lead.

Theobald, as may be gathered from the letters he wrote during his illness, was a man of deep religious feeling. He was charitable to the poor and liberal in all things (Becket Materials, ii. 307; Monasticon, iv. 363). He loved learning, and took care to be surrounded by learned men. In manner he was gracious, and in temperament gentle, affectionate, and placable. While calm and patient, he was also firm and courageous. As a ruler he was wise and able; he was highly respected by the leaders of the religious movement of which St. Bernard was the head, and by relying on the help of the Roman see, and taking advantage of the civil disorder of Stephen's reign, he succeeded in raising the church of England to a position of great power. In his ordinary administration he promoted worthy and capable men; he may be said to have been the founder of canonical jurisprudence in England, and through John of Salisbury introduced system and regularity into the working of the ecclesiastical courts. Though himself a Benedictine, he wisely did all he could to check the efforts made by monasteries to rid themselves of episcopal control. In secular matters he acted with loyalty and skill; he remained faithful to Stephen as the king recognised by the Roman see, though he did not shrink from opposing him whenever he tried to override the will of the church or use it as a mere political instrument. At the same time he worked steadily to secure the succession for the house of Anjou. His character, the success of his work, and the means by which he accomplished it entitle him to a place among the best and ablest archbishops of Canterbury.



THEOBALD, LEWIS (1688–1744), editor of Shakespeare, was the son of Peter Theobald, an attorney practising at Sittingbourne in Kent. He was born in that town and was baptised at the parish church, as the register testifies, on 2 April 1688. He was placed under the tuition of an able schoolmaster, the Rev. M. Ellis of Isleworth (Baker MSS. extract in Gentleman's Magazine, lxi. 788). To Ellis he must have owed much, for Theobald's classical attainments were considerable, and it does not appear that he received any further instruction. It would seem from what he says in his dedication of the ‘Happy Captive’ to Lady Monson that he had early been left an orphan in great poverty, that he had been protected and educated by Lady Monson's father, her brother, Lord Sondes, being his fellow-pupil, but that he had not made the best of what ‘might have accrued to him from so favourable a situation in life.’ Like his father, he became an attorney; but the law was distasteful to him, and he very soon abandoned it for literature. His first publication was a Pindaric ode on the union of England and Scotland, which appeared in 1707. In his preface to his tragedy ‘The Persian Princess,’ printed in 1715, he tells us that that play was written and acted before he had completed his nineteenth year, which would be in 1707. In May 1713 he translated for Bernard Lintot the ‘Phædo’ of Plato, and entered into a contract for a translation of the tragedies of Æschylus. Lintot's account-books show that Theobald contracted for many translations which were either not finished or not published, but between 1714 and 1715 he published translations of the ‘Electra’ (1714), of the ‘Ajax’ (1714), and of the ‘Œdipus Rex’ (1715) of Sophocles, and of the ‘Plutus’ and the ‘Clouds’ (both in 1715) of Aristophanes. The translations from Sophocles are in free and spirited blank verse, the choruses in lyrics, and the tragedies are divided into acts and scenes; the versions of the ‘Plutus’ and the ‘Clouds’ are in vigorous and racy colloquial prose.

Theobald had now settled down to the pursuits of the literary hack, being in all probability dependent on his pen for his livelihood. In 1713 he hurried out a catchpenny ‘Life of Cato’ for the benefit of the spectators and readers of Addison's tragedy which then held the town. Next year he published two poems—‘The Cave of Poverty,’ which he calls an imitation of Shakespeare, presumably because it is written in the measure and form of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ and ‘The Mausoleum,’ a funeral elegy in heroics on the death of Queen Anne. These poems, like all Theobald's