Richard Garnett (philologist)

Within two years he had taught himself sufficient Latin, Greek, and divinity to obtain ordination from the Archbishop of York, whose chaplain pronounced him the best prepared candidate he had ever examined.

In 1834 he married Rayne, daughter of John Wreaks, esq., of Sheffield, and in 1836 was presented to the living of Chebsey, near Stafford, which he relinquished in 1838, on succeeding Henry Francis Cary, the translator of Dante, as assistant-keeper of printed books at the British Museum.

[3] About 1826 he came before the world as a writer on the 'Roman Catholic controversy', contributing numerous articles to the Protestant Guardian, the most remarkable of which were extremely humorous and sarcastic exposures of the apocryphal miracles attributed to St. Francis Xavier.

He also commenced and in great measure completed an extensive work in reply to Charles Butler on the subject of ecclesiastical miracles; but the extreme depression of spirits occasioned by the death of his wife and infant daughter in 1828 and 1829 compelled him to lay it aside.

Though exemplary in his attention to his duties at the British Museum, he took little part in the great changes then being effected in the library under Anthony Panizzi, but was an active member of the Philological Society founded in 1842.

To its 'Transactions' he contributed numerous papers, including two long and important series of essays "On the Languages and Dialects of the British Islands," and "On the Nature and Analysis of the Verb".

Besides his philological essays, edited by his eldest son in 1859, and his theological writings, which have not hitherto been collected, he was author of some graceful poems and translations, and of a remarkable paper 'On the Formation of Ice at the Bottoms of Rivers' in the Transactions of the Royal Institution for 1818, containing a most graphic account of the phenomenon from personal observation.