Richard Farmer

Gerrard Andrewes, in the free grammar school at Leicester, and about 1753 entered as a pensioner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A.

[3] The two scholars afterwards maintained a correspondence on literary topics; on one occasion Johnson requested Farmer to help George Steevens on translations which Shakespeare might have seen, and on another he himself asked for information from the university registers on Cambridge graduates in the Lives of the Poets.

In 1775, on the death of Dr. Richardson, he was chosen master of Emmanuel College, Henry Hubbard, the senior fellow, having declined the post.

One member of the Caput refused to give up the key of the place containing the university seal, and Farmer is said to have forced open the door with a sledge-hammer—an exploit which some biographers allege to have been the cause of all his subsequent preferments.

On the death of Dr. Barnardiston, master of Corpus Christi College, he was (27 June 1778) unanimously elected principal librarian of the university.

When a young man he wrote some Directions for Studying the English History, which were printed in the European Magazine for 1791 and in William Seward's Biographiana.

[2] On 15 May 1766 Farmer issued from the university press proposals for printing the history of Leicester, written by Thomas Staveley; but eventually abandoned this plan.

[2] In 1767 he brought out the first edition of his only published work, an Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare (Cambridge), addressed to his friend and schoolfellow, Joseph Cradock of Gumley.

A scurrilous pamphlet, entitled 'The Battle between Dr. Farmer and Peter Musgrave, the Cambridge Taylor, in Hudibrastic verse,’ appeared at London in 1792.