Brewer

Brewer, JOHN SHERREN, born at Norwich in 1810, graduated with classical honours at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1833, took orders, and was appointed professor of English in King's College, London, in 1841. For nearly twenty years he laboured in the Record-office, editing the Monumenta Franciscana (1858); the Opus Tertium and Opus Minus of Roger Bacon (1859); vols. i.-iii. of The Works of Giraldus Cambrensis (1861); the Calendar of the Carew Papers (1861), with the aid of Mr Bullen; and vols. i.-iv. of the Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. (1862-72). As an editor, Brewer possessed patient industry and a rare sense of order, besides marvellously sound judgment and extensive knowledge. His essays and reviews in English Studies, edited by Dr Wace, with a brief biography (1880), reveal his vast knowledge and his broad sympathies, as well as a delicacy of touch and a fineness of literary insight seldom found in the laborious student. Brewer was elected Honorary Fellow of Queen's College in 1870, and in 1877 was presented to the living of Topesfield, in Essex, where he died February 16, 1879.