John Stoddart

Stoddart was educated at Salisbury Grammar School, and, subsequently, at Christ Church, Oxford, at which he matriculated on 25 October 1790, and graduated B.A.

In April 1814, Stoddart entered into an agreement with John Walter, the owner of The Times, to become the editor of the newspaper.

Stoddart learned Italian because the Maltese complained that former judges had been imperfectly acquainted with the languages spoken on the island.

He studied etymological theory, which he believed would supplant that of Horne Tooke, and published the first part of the same, in a work named Glossology, or the Historical Relations of Languages, in 1858 in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana.

On 1 August 1803, John Stoddart married Isabella Moncrieff, who was the eldest daughter of the Reverend Sir Henry Wellwood-Moncreiff, 8th Baronet (1750–1828), and Susan Robertson Barclay.

Another son, John Frederick, became a member of the Scottish bar in 1827, a judge in Ceylon in 1836, and died of a jungle fever while on circuit on 29 Aug. 1839 (Gent.

One daughter, Isabella Maxwell Stoddart, married Captain George Whitmore at Malta, on 22 February 1827.

Another, Mary Anne Stoddart, married Francis Baring Atkinson at Malta on 24 December 1831, and died bearing a child at Marseilles, 29 November 1832.

Burke's Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Peerage and Baronetage (1865) mentions only one daughter, (Isabella) Whitmore, and three sons, John-Frederick, William, Thomas.

Of his writings on legal subjects, the most important was A Letter to Lord Brougham, one in the minority of the law lords by whom the great Irish marriage case, Queen v. Millis, was decided in 1844, and, as Stoddart endeavored to show, erroneously decided.

His legal acumen was also shown in his article "The Head of the Church" in the Law Review, February 1851, pp. 418–36.

He translated from the French of Joseph Despaze The Five Men, or a review of the Proceedings and Principles of the Executive Directory of France, with the lives of the present Members, (1797); and, with Georg Heinrich Noehden, Schiller's Fiesco, (1796), and Don Carlos, (1798).