White, RICHARD GRANT

White, RICHARD GRANT, Shakespearian scholar, was born in New York, 22d May 1821, and died there, 8th April 1885. He graduated at New York university in 1839, next studied medicine, and then law, being admitted to the bar in 1845, but was finally drawn towards journalism. For fourteen years he contributed to the New York Courier and Enquirer, and during the civil war wrote a remarkable series of letters under the signature of 'A Yankee' for the London Spectator. He acted also for about twenty years as chief of the United States revenue marine bureau in the district of New York, resigning only in 1878. His acute criticisms in Putnam's Magazine on J. Payne Collier's famous folio MS. emendations of Shakespeare (1852) first revealed that intimate knowledge of Shakespeare which gave so much value to the succeeding books: Shakespeare's Scholar (1854), a complete annotated edition (12 vols. Boston, 1857-65), Essay on the Authorship of the three parts of Henry VI. (1859), Memoirs of William Shakespeare (1865), the 'Riverside Edition' of Shakespeare (3 vols. Cambridge, 1883), and the collected Studies in Shakespeare (Boston, 1885). Other works worthy of being named are Words and their Uses (New York, 1870), The American View of the Copyright Question (1880), Everyday English (1881), and English Without and Within (1881).