Francis Grose

He produced A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions (1787).

His parents were Swiss immigrant and jeweller Francis Jacob Grose (d. 1769), and his wife, Anne (d. 1773), daughter of Thomas Bennett of Greenford in Middlesex.

[1] In 1757, Grose was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries, and 1759 he resumed his soldiering career, this time in the militia, which meant he could avoid distant postings.

[2] With bequests from his parents and from his wife, who died in 1774, added to the salary he drew as a militia captain, Grose at this time was able to live reasonably well despite the demands made on his purse by the need to raise, educate and provide for his children.

Essentially, it targeted those who wanted to know about antiquities but had neither time nor means to visit them in person, and contained small panoramas of medieval ruins, together with an informative text on a separate page.

Sometimes the text was taken from books already published, or from information supplied by other antiquaries (both acknowledged); sometimes Grose collated material himself from which he could work up an article.

Where previously Grose had been able to spend his summers visiting and sketching ancient sites, he was now obliged to attend his regiment in various training camps.

[5] Though intended to amuse, they give an unusually vivid picture of the speech of the day which would not normally find inclusion in standard dictionaries, and contained, in all, about 9,000 terms which more scholarly works of the time habitually overlooked.

[citation needed] Grose was the first art critic to affirm, in his "Rules for drawing caricaturas: with an essay on comic painting" (1788), published in William Hogarth's The Analysis of Beauty (1791 edition), that aesthetic emotions emerge from a specific "cultural" environment, and that aesthetics are neither innate nor universal, but formed by their cultural context.

[6] While on an expedition to Ireland to collect antiquarian material, Grose died in Dublin at the house of Horace Hone, of an apoplectic stroke.