Gosse, PHILIP HENRY

Gosse, PHILIP HENRY, naturalist, was born at Worcester, 10th April 1810, and brought up at Poole. In 1827 he went to Newfoundland as a clerk, and was afterwards in turns farmer in Canada, school-master in Alabama, and professional naturalist in Jamaica. Returning to England, he published in 1840 the Canadian Naturalist, and after another stay in the West Indies settled in England to a busy life of letters. His early experiences and observations supplied the material for his popular books, the richly illustrated Birds of Jamaica (1851) and A Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica (1851). His Naturalist's Ramble on the Devonshire Coast (1853), Aquarium (1854), and Manual of Marine Zoology (1855-56) inspired Charles Kingsley's Glaucus, and opened up a new branch of science to Englishmen. Gosse was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1856, and over sixty monographs in its Proceedings are from his pen. His best-known work, the Romance of Natural History, appeared in 1860-62. Later and more severely scientific works were his Actinologia Britannica (1860) and the Prehensile Armature of the Papilionidae (1885). In 1886 he placed in the hands of Dr C. T. Hudson the notes and drawings of a lifetime on the microscopic study of the Rotifera. Mr Gosse spent the last thirty years of his life in a retired South Devon village, and died 23d August 1888.—EDMUND WILLIAM GOSSE, his only son, was born in London, September 21, 1849, was educated in Devonshire, and became at eighteen an assistant-librarian at the British Museum, in 1875 translator to the Board of Trade. He travelled in Scandinavia and Holland, and made himself master of the languages of these countries. In 1884 he succeeded Mr Leslie Stephen as Clark lecturer in English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, a post from which he retired in 1889, having four years before received the honorary degree of M.A. from the university. During 1884-85 he lectured in Boston, at Harvard and Yale colleges, and in Baltimore and New York. Mr Gosse has tried various forms of verse, and possesses many of the qualities of the genuine poet. Among his writings in verse are Madrigals, Songs, and Sonnets (1870); On Viol and Flute, lyrical poems (1873); King Erik, a tragedy (1876); The Unknown Lover, a drama (1878); New Poems (1879); and Firdausi in Exile, and other Poems (1886). His chief writings in prose are in the field of literary criticism: Northern Studies, a series of essays on Scandinavian and Dutch literature (1879); Gray, in 'English Men of Letters' (1882); Seventeenth-century Studies, on Lodge, Webster, Rowlands, Herrick, Crashaw, Cowley, Etheredge, and Otway (1883); From Shakspeare to Pope (1885); Life of Congreve (1888); History of Eighteenth-Century Literature (1889); Critical Kit-Kats (1896); and a History of Modern English Literature (1897). Besides these he contributed many critical essays towards English Poets (1880-81), edited English Odes (1881), and a faultless complete edition of Gray (1884). He published a Life of his father in 1890, and contributed the article POETRY to this Encyclopædia. The Secret of Narcisse, a prose tale, appeared in 1892.