Robert Aris Willmott

Willmott -- the son of a solicitor, who married, about 1803, to Mary Ann (died 1861), daughter of Rev John Cleeve of Ringwood, Hampshire -- was born at Bradford, Wiltshire on 30 January 1809.

The church of St. Catherine, Bearwood, which had been erected with the support of John Walter, was consecrated on 23 April 1846, and Willmott was appointed by him as its first incumbent.

[1] Willmott moved to Nettlebed in Oxfordshire, and began writing for the Churchman's Family Magazine.’ He was engaged in the preparation of three new books when he was incapacitated by an attack of paralysis.

He was buried, with his mother and sister (Mary Cleeve Willmott, who died at Richmond on 9 May 1854, aged 47), in the churchyard of Bearwood.

His best known works were:[1] His other works included:[1] Willmott edited for George Routledge's British Poets the poems of Thomas Gray, Thomas Parnell, William Collins, Matthew Green, and Thomas Warton (1854 and 1883); the works of George Herbert in prose and verse (1854; Herbert's poems, with Willmott's memoir and notes, were then published at Boston, U.S.A., in 1855); the poems of Mark Akenside and John Dyer (1855), William Cowper (1855), Robert Burns (1856; reissued in 1866), Percy's Reliques (1857), and Edward Fairfax's translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1858).

He edited selections from the poetry of William Wordsworth (1859) and James Montgomery (1859), and the poems of Oliver Goldsmith (1860).

47–53), and he contributed notes to Samuel Pegge's ‘Anecdotes of the English Language’ (1844 ed.