Charles Merivale

Charles Merivale ( born March 8, 1808 † December 27, 1893 in Ely ) was a British historian and for many years dean of Ely Cathedral.

He was the second son of John Herman Merivale and Louisa Heath Drury, daughter of Dr. Drury, rector of Harrow. From 1818 to 1824 he attended the boarding school Harrow under Dr. Butler, where he was friends especially with Charles Wordsworth, nephew of William Wordsworth and later Bishop of St Andrews, and Richard Chenevix Trench, later Archbishop of Dublin.

In 1824 he was offered a position in the Indian civil administration; this he attended for a short time the Haileybury College, where he studied Oriental languages ​​, but then decided against the offer. He moved in 1826 to St John 's College, Cambridge, where he was elected fellow in 1833. He was a member of the elite secret society Cambridge Apostles, which also included Alfred Tennyson, AH Hallam, Monckton Milnes, William Hepworth Thompson, Trench and James Spedding.

Merivale was a committed athlete, was begun in 1824 for Harrow against Eton and to him and his friend Wordsworth, who studied at Oxford, is also the first boat race between the rowing clubs of both universities back to 1829. He was ordained in 1833, worked for six years at the College and at the University, and in 1839 was appointed a preacher at Whitehall.

In 1848 he went to the College of Lawford at Manningtree in Essex; In 1850 he married Judith Mary Sophia Frere, youngest daughter of George Frere. In 1863 he was appointed priest of the speaker of the House ( Speaker of the British House of Commons ). In 1869 he became a professor of modern history at Cambridge, but took in the same year the offer of Gladstone on to become Dean of Ely; in this office he remained until his death in 1893.

His major work was A History of the Romans under the Empire in seven volumes, published 1850-1862. In addition, he wrote a series of smaller historical works, published sermons, lectures, and Latin verses. As a historian, he can not compare with Edward Gibbon, but he occupies a very reasonable and appreciative perspective. The main error of his work, inevitably, to the time of writing, is that it refers to literary gossip more leaves than on factual evidence. The dean was an elegant scholar, and his rendition of John Keats ' Hyperion in Latin verse (1862 ) was highly praised.