Tyrwhitt, THOMAS

Tyrwhitt, THOMAS, the first adequate editor of Chaucer, was born in London, 29th March 1730. He was descended from a good Lincolnshire family, and his father, at his birth rector of St James's, Westminster, was afterwards canon of St Paul's, archdeacon of London, and canon of Windsor. He was educated at Eton and Queen's College, Oxford, and was elected fellow of Merton in 1755, but left college in 1762 to become clerk of the House of Commons. Finding this office too arduous for his health, he resigned in 1768, and devoted the rest of his life to letters down to his death at London, 15th August 1786. Tyrwhitt was a man of unusual amiability of character, as well as a scholar of great learning and industry, and of fine critical insight besides. His most important work was the well-known and admirable edition of the Canterbury Tales, with dissertations, notes, and glossary (2 vols. 1775; 5 vols. 1778); the next, the posthumous edition of Aristotle's Poetics (edited from his papers by Burgess and Randolph; 1794). Other books were a refutation of the antiquity of the Rowley poems of Chatterton (1778), a dissertation on Babrius (1776), and Conjectures on Strabo, on Æschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, &c.