Hannay, JAMES

Hannay, JAMES, critic and novelist, was born at Dumfries, 17th February 1827. A few years of boyhood were spent in the navy, from which he was dismissed at eighteen by a court-martial sentence, afterwards quashed as irregular. He early devoted himself to a busy life of letters, finding a favourite pastime in the study of genealogy, heraldry, the classics, and 18th-century English literature. In 1860-64 he edited the Edinburgh Courant, and was afterwards British consul at Barcelona, where he died suddenly, 3d January 1873. Of his novels the best are Singleton Fontenoy (1850) and Eustace Conyers (1855). His Lectures on Satire and Satirists (1854) and Essays from the Quarterly Review (1861) show wide knowledge and fine literary sense, often expressed in admirably terse and epigrammatic English. Other works were Three Hundred Years of a Norman House—the Gurney family (1866), and Studies on Thackeray (1869).