Francis Turner Palgrave

At fourteen he was sent as a day-boy to Charterhouse; and in 1843, having in the meanwhile travelled extensively in Italy and other parts of the continent, he won a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford.

[2] In 1846 he interrupted his university career to serve as assistant private secretary to Gladstone, but returned, to Oxford the next year, and took a first class in Literae Humaniores.

[3] He lived at the Hampstead home with his widowed father until on 30 December 1862, he married Cecil Grenville Milnes, daughter of James Milnes-Gaskell, MP for Much Wenlock and a friend of Gladstone.

Throughout 1870s the Palgraves paid repeated visits and stays at Hatfield House, the home of the future Conservative Prime Minister, Lord and Lady Salisbury.

Palgrave continued to work in the Privy Council's Education Department until he resigned his position in 1884, and in the following year succeeded John Campbell Shairp as professor of poetry at Oxford.

His Visions of England (1880–1881) has dignity and lucidity, but little of the "natural magic" which the greatest of his predecessors in the Oxford chair considered to be the test of inspiration.

But Palgrave's principal contribution to the development of literary taste was contained in his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and followed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed.

Among his other works were The Passionate Pilgrim (1858), a volume of selections from Robert Herrick entitled Chrysomela (1877), a memoir of Arthur Hugh Clough (1862) and a critical essay on Sir Walter Scott (1866) as a preface to an edition of his poems.