William Spalding (writer)

For the last twenty years of his life he served as professor of rhetoric and logic, in addition to authoring essays, reviews and historical texts.

[1] Born in Aberdeen, to advocate James Spalding and his wife, Frances Read, young William was educated in the city's grammar school and at Marischal College.

In that year he published a Letter on Shakespeare's Authorship of the Two Noble Kinsmen (reprinted for the New Shakspere Society in 1876, seventeen years after his death), which attracted the notice of leading literary critic Francis Jeffrey, who invited Spalding to contribute to the Edinburgh Review.

[2][3] Having devoted much time to studying Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists, he continued to write on these topics for the Review.

His other writings included contributions to Blackwood's Magazine and the eighth edition (1853–60) of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which contains his biographical entries on Joseph Addison, Francis Bacon, Demosthenes, Sir Walter Scott and Torquato Tasso as well as articles on fable, fallacy, logic, rhetoric and slavery.