Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/542

Rh 504 A L F R D of a Somersetshire family, five generations of which, in direct succession, contributed clergymen of some distinction to the English Church. The earliest of these, his great- great-grandfather, Thomas Alford, who died in 1708, was for many years the vicar of Curry Rivell, near Tauuton a living that passed from one to another of his descendants. The father of Dean Alford studied for the bar, but after practising for a short time, followed the course of his predecessors by taking holy orders; and, until his death at a venerable age in 1852, had long been familiarly known and revered in his part of the country as the rector of Aston Sandford in Buckinghamshire. His first wife, the dean s mother, whose ma den name was Sarah Eliza Paget, was the younger daughter of a well-to-do banker of Tamworth in Staffordshire. A twelvemonth after their marriage, her husband, then practising as a special pleader, was by her premature death in childbed left a widower. The newly-born infant, who remained to the last the bereaved parent s only child, was confided in the first instance to the affectionate care of the home-circle in the house of his maternal grand father. Towards the close of 1813 he was taken back to the lonely hearth of his father, who had now entered upon his clerical duties as curate of Steeple Ashton, near Trowbridge in Wiltshire. Being the only son of a secluded scholar, the boy s education was from an unusually early period sedulously cared for; his father being his first instructor, and at the outset his constant companion. So exceptional was his precocity that at six he had already written a little MS. volume entitled (in round hand) the Travels of St Paul. Before he was eight he had penned a collection of Latin odes in miniature. When he was scarcely nine he had compiled, in the straggling characters of a school boy, a compendious History of the Jews; besides drawing out a chronological scheme in which were tabulated the events of the Old Testament. Prior to the completion of his tenth year he actually produced a series of terse sermons or laconically outlined homilies, the significant title of which was Looking unto Jesus. During the absence of his father, who had gone abroad as the travelling chaplain of Lord Calthorpe, Henry, at seven years of age, began the round of three academies, at Charmouth and Hammer smith ; the happiest time of all for him as a schoolboy being three years and upwards passed in the grammar- school at Ilminster. His character was already displaying a marked individuality. He could repeat not only readily but appreciatively an astonishing number of lines in Greek, Latin, and English, selected from what were then and always afterwards his favourite classic authors. He indulged, too, in those early days, in the luxury of original versification. Then it was also that he first began to manifest that singular capacity for ingenious contrivance and that sur prising neatness and dexterity of manipulation for which he was afterwards remarkable. It was said of him later in life, that he could construct an organ and then play upon it ; and when his reputation for profound scholarship had been long established, his constructiveness was curiously manifested by his adaptation to the purposes of utility of the seemingly ordinary walking-stick he carried when travelling on the Continent. In its upper joint he secreted his surplus money and his drawing materials; in its lower joint, pens, ink, wax, and pencils. Strangely contrasting with this ineradicable passion for nicety and precision was his delight at all times in giving himself up to the most diversified occupations, and in yielding, often at an instant s notice, as he sometimes notes with regret, to the temptation of mere discursiveness. It was in the October of 1827 that the university life of Alford commenced. At seventeen he went up to Cam bridge, having won his scholarship, and had his name entered at Trinity College. During the midsummer of his fourth year at Cambridge, in the June of 1831, he had obtained the second prize essay. As the autumn deepened into winter he was nervously preparing to go in for honours at the examinations. In the possibility of his success he had not the slightest confidence, yet on the 21st January 1832 he appears as thirty-fourth wrangler; while on the 25th February his name comes out eighth on the first-class list of the classical tripos. He now began to take pupils, and within the interval which elapsed between his taking his degree and giving himself up more completely to the great work of his life the elaboration of his edition of the Greek New Testament it is believed that he had under his charge at least sixty. These included barristers, clergymen, peers, and members of parliament; many of whom afterwards attained positions of eminence, all of them having their characters moulded more or less iinder the inspiring influence of his. In his twenty-sixth year he was united in marriage to his cousin Fanny, a daughter of his uncle, the Rev. Samuel Alford, who was then, as his father and his great-grandfather had been before him, vicar of Curry Ilivell. Surviving her husband after nearly thirty- five years of wedded life, during which she had seen the development of his intellectual powers and the realisation of some portions at least of his many-sided ambition, she brought out in 1872 his journals and correspondence, care fully edited by herself. A curiously characteristic side-light is thrown upon Alford s inner nature, both moral and intel lectual, by the circumstance there recorded that, with a view to enable his future wife to read the New Testament in Greek, lie wrote with his own hand, in the interval be tween betrothal and marriage, an elementary Greek gram mar of sixty folio pages. The incident is all the more interesting as affording the earliest glimpse of what soon proved to be his dominant aspiration. His researches in secular scholarship were at this time becoming every year more and more adventurous. He shrank not from proclaim ing even then that he regarded Niebuhr as &quot; one of the greatest men in this ignorant and obstinate world.&quot; Mean while, in the midst of his excursive inquiries as a student in the most opposite directions, he was indulging at every available opportunity in the lotos-delight of his own day- dreamings ; and in February 1833, he published his maiden work as a lyrist, Poems and Poetical Fragments. Simply as an instructor lie was working steadily seven hours a-day ; but the time came when, in furtherance of his favourite researches, he was known to toil at the desk sometimes twelve or fourteen. Piesolved from childhood to tread t^ie path of life in the footsteps of his forefathers, Alford was ordained deacon on the 2Gth October 1833, and at once began active pro fessional work as curate of Ampton. So modest was hib own estimate of his intellectual capabilities, that it was with unaffected surprise he found his name second on the list of the six Fellows of Trinity who were elected on the 1st of the following October. On the Gth November he was admitted to priest s orders, and four months afterwards, upon the 4th March 1835 scarcely a week before his marriage entered upon his parochial labours of eighteen years duration as vicar of Wymcswold in Leicestershire. Twice during the interval of his scholarly seclusion in that quiet vicarage he was vainly tempted with the offer of a colonial bishopric, first in 1841 as bishop of New Zealand, and again in 1844 as bishop of New Brunswick. He con tentedly drudged on for years together in comparative obscurity among his pupils and parishioners. Although a ripe scholar, and remarkable for his splendid versatility, it was less by the brilliancy of his achievements than by the sheer force of the most diligent perseverance that he pushed his way eventually into the front rank, and com manded at last the recognition of his contemporaries.