Charles Smith Bird

Charles Smith Bird (1795–1862) was an English academic, cleric and tutor, known as a theological author and writer of devotional verse, and described as a High Church Evangelical.

[2] His father was William Bird (died 1814), a West Indies merchant;[3] of a religious character, he objected, for instance, to his children reading Shakespeare.

He took pupils for twenty years, an early one being Thomas Babington Macaulay who joined a reading party at Llanrwst in 1821.

There he led a quiet life, occasionally lecturing at the Gainsborough Literary and Mechanics' Institute on natural history, English literature, and other subjects.

Against the Irish educational measures for Catholics, he wrote Call to the Protestants of England, later inserted among his poems.

[9] The views Bird held were related to those of George Stanley Faber, combining justification by faith with support of episcopacy, and some sympathy with Calvinism, for a "moderate evangelicalism".

[10] Bird was reticent by nature, publishing his 1838 work against the Tracts for the Times at the urging of Henry Budd.

[2] Among his other friends were Sir Claudius Hunter, 1st Baronet, George Thomas Hutton the rector of Gate-Burton, Alfred Ollivant, and the Rev.

[4] As an opponent of the Tractarians, he wrote:[4] Other works were:[4] Bird was also an entomologist, and became a fellow of the Linnean Society in 1828, publishing in the Entomological Magazine.