Pococke, RICHARD

Pococke, RICHARD, 'the Traveller,' was born at Southampton in 1704, and educated there and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Precentor successively of Lismore and Waterford, then Archdeacon of Dublin (1745), in 1756 he was consecrated Bishop of Ossory, and had just been translated to Meath, when, on 15th September 1765, while on a visitation, he died very suddenly at Charleville, near Tullamore. His travels, which took up nearly nine years of his life, and in which he must have ridden some 52,000 miles, are described in two folios dealing with his four years' wanderings in Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia (1743-45), in a volume on his tours in Scotland (Scottish History Soc., 1887), in two on his tours through England (Camden Soc., 1888-89) and in one on Ireland (edited by J. T. Stokes, 1891)—books that are as dull as they are valuable. Pococke was, moreover, the pioneer of Alpine travel, for in 1741 he led a dozen Englishmen, all strongly armed, to the Vale of Chamouni, whose grateful inhabitants carved his name and the date on a huge granite boulder close to the Mer de Glace.