Coxe, HENRY OCTAVIUS

Coxe, HENRY OCTAVIUS, librarian, was born at Bucklebury vicarage in Berkshire, September 20, 1811. He had his education at Westminster and Worcester College, Oxford, and entered the manuscript department of the British Museum in 1833, soon after taking orders. In 1838 he became attached to the Bodleian Library, in 1860 its head, and here his marvellous knowledge and patient kindness made him the very ideal of the librarian. Already in 1857 he had been sent by Sir G. C. Lewis to the East on a tour of discovery, which resulted indeed in his finding many codices, though the grasping greed of the ignorant monks, at last awakened to their value, made it impossible to buy them. Coxe held in succession several curacies near Oxford, and in 1868 became rector of Wytham. He was Select preacher in 1842, Whitehall preacher in 1868, and in 1878 presided at the first annual meeting of the Library Association at Oxford. Coxe died July 8, 1881. Although himself an excellent palæographer and ripe scholar, Coxe did much more for others' reputations than his own. The most important of his own works were an edition of Roger of Wendover's Chronicle (5 vols. 1841-44), and of Gower's Vox Clamantis for the Roxburghe Club (1850), and his Catalogues of MSS. in the colleges and halls of Oxford (1852), and of the Bodleian MSS. (1853-54). See Dean Burgon's Lives of Twelve Good Men (1888).