Dyce

Dyce, ALEXANDER, a great English critic, was born at Edinburgh, 30th June 1798. He spent part of his boyhood at Aberdeen, and had his education at the Edinburgh High School, and Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1819. He took orders, but soon abandoned the clerical calling to settle in London as a busy man of letters. His name will never be forgotten for the rare combination of learning, patience, and sagacity in his great editions of the dramatists, Peele (1828-39), Webster (1830; new ed. 1857), Greene (1831; in one vol. with Peele, 1858), Shirley (a completion of Gifford's ed. 1833), Middleton (1840), Beaumont and Fletcher (1843-46), Marlowe (1850; new ed. 1861), and Ford (a revised ed. of Gifford's, 1869). His edition of Shakespeare (9 vols. 1857; new ed. 1864-67) is not yet superseded. Besides these he edited between 1831 and 1835 the poems of Shake- speare, Pope, Akenside, and Beattie, for Pickering's Aldine Edition of the Poets. Other works were his edition of Richard Bentley's works (1836-38), of Skelton's works (1843), and his Recollections of the Table-talk of Samuel Rogers (1856). He edited for the Camden, Percy, and Shakespeare societies, and was one of the severest assailants of Payne Collier's Shakespeare vagaries, an act of duty which ended an old friendship. Dyce died 15th May 1869, bequeathing his fine library to South Kensington Museum.