Spanish fiction -- Translations into English; Spanish poetry -- Translations into English
Unfortunately, this entry is not an autograph: all the other entries on
the page which contains it are, as the Keeper of the Archives informs
me, in the same handwriting. The _Oxford University Calendar_ for 1823
gives (p. 275) our author's names in this form and sequence: James
Willoughby Gordon Gill. This form and order are repeated in the _Oxford
University Calendar_ for the years 1824 and 1825. In the alphabetical
index to the _Calendar_ for 1823-1824-1825 this Pembroke undergraduate
is entered as: _Gill, James G. W._ As the editors of the semi-official
_Calendar_ derive their information from the College authorities,
we may take it that, from 1822 to 1825 inclusive, the future author
passed as James Gill at Pembroke, and amongst those who knew him best.
It cannot be supposed that the Master and Fellows of Pembroke made
a wrong return for three consecutive years, nor that they wilfully
reversed the order of Gill's Christian names with the express object of
annoying him. Had they done either of these things, Gill was the very
man to protest energetically: his conduct in later years snows that
he was punctilious in these matters. However, it is right to bear in
mind that the Matricula Book gives Gill's Christian names in the same
order as they appear on his title-pages. I have failed to obtain any
details of his career at Pembroke. Mr. Wood, the present Librarian at
Pembroke, states that there is "no proper record" of the Commoners at
that College in Gill's time. On this point I have only to say that the
poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was in residence at Pembroke with Gill, and
that information concerning Beddoes's undergraduate days is apparently
not lacking. Possibly more careful research might discover some trace
of Gill at Oxford. He seems to have taken no degree, and to have left
no memory or tradition at Pembroke. He himself tells us (_A Tractate
on Language_, First Edition, p. iii) that when at Oxford "he formed an
acquaintance with a gentleman of considerable erudition, but not of
either University, who had made the English tongue his peculiar care."
To this association we owe _A Tractate on Language_, and, perhaps, the
peculiarities of style which Gill afterwards developed. But, in the
latter respect, a serious responsibility may attach to Milton; for, in
his _Tractate_, Gill refers to the poet and laments (p. 224) that, at
the period of which he speaks, "the Allegro and Penseroso were confined
to the closets of the judicious." The inference is that Gill modelled
his diction on both these poems.
His name disappears from the _Oxford University Calendar_ in 1826. He
visited Mexico in 1832 (_History of Wraysbury_, p. 49), and perhaps
during this journey he picked up a queer smattering of Spanish. On
August 29, 1839, he married "Anne Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward
Bowyer-Smijth, Bt.," and this seems to have given a new direction to
what he calls his "studious tendencies."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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