Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/406

 of Winchester Cathedral in 1874. One of the last deeds of his life was to send his signature to the clerical declaration against war with Russia. He died suddenly at the Church Farm, Harbridge, one of the chapelries of Ringwood, on 26 Jan. 1878, and was buried at Harbridge on 1 Feb. Williams was endowed with a noble presence and dignified voice. A reredos was erected in Ringwood church as a memorial to his memory, a ‘George Williams’ prize for distinction in the theological tripos was founded by his friends at Cambridge, and a bronze tablet, with a portrait-bust in relief, designed by W. Burgess, R.A., was placed in the third side-chapel on the south side of the nave of King's College chapel.

No English writer has surpassed Williams in accurate knowledge of the topography of Jerusalem. He brought out in 1845 a volume on ‘The Holy City; with Illustrations from Sketches by the Rev. W. F. Witts.’ A second edition was entitled ‘The Holy City; second edition, with Additions, including an Architectural History of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by the Rev. Robert Willis’ (1849, 2 vols. 8vo). For this work he received from the king of Prussia a medal for literary merit.

Williams invited Dr. Ermete Pierotti to Cambridge, assisted him in preparing his work of ‘Jerusalem Explored’ for the press, and revised it during printing. The author was accused by Fergusson and others of plagiarism, and Williams defended him in ‘Dr. Pierotti and his Assailants,’ 1864. He published in 1846 a collection of ‘Sermons preached at Jerusalem in 1842 and 1843,’ and supplied the introduction to William Wey's ‘Itineraries to Jerusalem and Compostella,’ printed for the Roxburghe Club in 1857. His description of ‘The Holy Land: Travels in Palestine from Dan to Beersheba,’ announced in 1849 as ‘preparing for publication,’ never appeared.

Williams edited in 1868 ‘The Orthodox Church of the East in the Eighteenth Century,’ correspondence between the eastern patriarchs and the nonjuring bishops on the reunion of that church and the Anglican communion; and he edited, with a long introduction and an appendix of illustrative documents, for the Rolls Series, in 1872, two volumes of official correspondence of Bishop Beckington. He was one of the two cataloguers of ‘Monastic Cartularies’ for the catalogue of manuscripts at the Cambridge University Library, vol. iv., and he described the Baumgartner Papers in vol. v. Other miscellaneous writings included many articles in Smith's dictionaries of Greek and Roman geography, Christian biography, and Christian antiquities.

[Cambr. Univ. Cal. 1897–8, p. 555; Foster's Alumni Oxon.; Academy, 2 Feb. 1878, p. 98; Guardian, 30 Jan. 1878, pp. 141, 151, 6 Feb. pp. 195–6; information kindly given by Mr. F. L. Clarke, bursar-clerk at King's College.] 

WILLIAMS, GEORGE JAMES (1719–1805), wit and correspondent of Walpole and Selwyn, known as ‘Gilly Williams,’ born at Denton in Lincolnshire in 1719, was a younger son of William Peere Williams [q. v.], by Anne, daughter and coheiress of Sir George Hutchins [q. v.] Through the influence of Lord North, who married in 1756 a daughter of Williams's sister, he obtained on 8 Nov. 1774 the post of receiver-general of excise, which he held until 1801.

Williams was one of the gayest and wittiest of his set in London society. He was one of the famous partie quarrée consisting, besides himself, of George Selwyn, Dick Edgecumbe, and Horace Walpole, who met at stated periods in the year at Strawberry Hill, and constituted what Walpole styles his ‘out-of-town party.’ In November 1751 Williams informed Selwyn that he had desired Lord Robert Bertie to put him up for White's: ‘Don't let any member shake his head at me for a wit.’ It was not, however, until 1754 that ‘Gilly Williams’ was elected. When White's was ‘deserted’ in summer after parliament had risen, Williams continued to meet his friends ‘at wit and whist’ in George Selwyn's Thursday Club at the Star and Garter in Pall Mall, a favourite resort in the past of Swift and of Smollett.

Williams was the steadiest of all Selwyn's correspondents down to the close of 1766. In March 1765 he gives a humorous account of Walpole's ‘Castle of Otranto,’ then in process of completion, and he furnishes an amusing picture of Brighthelmstone in the sixties of the eighteenth century. He adopted as his motto a sentiment derived from Sir William Temple, ‘Old wood to burn, old friends to converse with, and old books to read.’ He seems, however, to have dropped out of his old circle, and little is heard of him after 1770. He died in Cleveland Court, St. James's, near the house where his old friend Selwyn had lived, on 28 Nov. 1805. He married, on 30 July 1752, Diana, daughter of William Coventry, fifth earl of Coventry, who appears to have died early without issue.

In December 1761 Horace Walpole wrote of ‘the charming picture Reynolds painted for me of Edgecumbe, Selwyn, and Gilly Williams.’ This picture was bought by Henry