Gifford, WILLIAM, man of letters, was born at Ashburton, Devonshire, in April 1756. Left an orphan at twelve, he was first a cabin-boy, then for four years a shoemaker's apprentice, till in 1776 his attempts at versifying attracted the notice of a local surgeon. With his assistance he proceeded two years later as a Bible clerk to Exeter College,
Oxford, and, after graduating in 1792, travelled on the Continent with Lord Grosvenor's son. His first production, the Baviad (1794), was a satire on the Della Cruscaus (q.v.); in Scott's phrase, it 'squashed them at one blow.' The Mæviad (1796) was levelled against the corrupters of the drama, and An Epistle to Peter Pindar against Dr Wolcot, who retorted with A Cut at a Cobbler. Gifford's editorship of the Anti-Jacobin (1797-98) procuring him favour with the Tory magnates, he was appointed to offices that jointly brought him £900 a year. In 1802 appeared his translation of Juvenal, and prefixed thereto an autobiography. He edited the works of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Ben Jonson, and in his notes assailed former editors with brutal ferocity. In 1809 he became the first editor of the Quarterly Review, and this post he filled to within two years of his death, on 31st December 1826. Gifford possessed much satirical acerbity and poison, but as a poet he holds no rank whatever. As translator and editor of the old English dramatists he did good service; but his labours in this field were marred by suspicion and malignity. As a critic he was bitterly partial and one-sided; and his onslaughts on Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Lamb, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats have as little pretension to fairness and candour as has Hazlitt's own onslaught on him in the Spirit of the Age (1825).