THOMAS

See also:

• THOMAS TYRWHITT (1730–1786)

TYRWHITT (1730–1786)  , English classical scholar and critic, was born in London on the 27th of March 1730, where he died on the 15th of August 1786 . He. was educated at Eton and Queen's College, Oxford (fellow of Merton, 1755) . In 1756 he was appointed under-secretary at war, in 1762 clerk of the House of Commons . In 1768 he resigned his post, and spent the remainder of his life in learned retirement . In 1784 he was elected a trustee of the British Museum, to which he bequeathed a portion of his valuable library . His principal classical works are: Fragmenta Plutarchi II. inedita (1773), from a Harleian MS.; Dissertatio de Babrio (1776), containing some fables of Aesop, hitherto unedited, from a Bodleian MS.; the pseudo-Orphic De lapidibus (1781), which he assigned to the age of Constantius; Conjecturae in Strabonem (1783); Isaeus De Meneclis hereditate (1785) ; Aristotle's Poetica, his most important work, published after his death under the superintendence of Dr Burgess, bishop of Salisbury, in 1194 . Special mention is due of his editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1775–1778) ; and of Poems, supposed to have been written at Bristol by Thomas Rowley and others in the Fifteenth Century (1777-1778), with an appendix to rove that the poems were all the work of Chatterton . In 1782 he published a Vindication of the Appendix in reply to the arguments of those who maintained the genuineness of the poems . While clerk of the House of Commons he edited Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, 1620-1621 from the original MS. in the library of Queen's College, Oxford, and Henry Elsynge's (1598-1654) The Manner of holding Parliaments in England .