Daniel Wray

Daniel Wray (28 November 1701 – 29 December 1783) was an English antiquary and Fellow of the Royal Society.

Born on 28 November 1701 in the parish of St. Botolph, Aldersgate, he was the youngest child of Sir Daniel Wray (died 1719), a London citizen and soap-boiler residing in Little Britain, by his second wife.

He was a keen antiquary and collector of rare books, and on 18 June 1765 was appointed one of the trustees of the British Museum.

Another, engraved by Henry Meyer from a painting by Nathaniel Dance, forms the frontispiece of the first volume of John Nichols's Literary Illustrations.

[1] In 1830 James Falconar published a work entitled The Secret Revealed, in which he made out a case for the identification of Wray as Junius.

After his death George Hardinge compiled a memoir to accompany a collection of his verses and correspondence, which he published in 1817 in the first volume of ‘Literary Illustrations,’ with a dedication to Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke.

Hardinge states that a sonnet by Richard Roderick, printed in Robert Dodsley's ‘Collection of Poems’ (ed.