Dr. Shaw returned to England in the year 1733. In the course of the next
year he took his degree of doctor of divinity, and was shortly afterward
elected fellow of the Royal Society. Having employed five years in the
composition and correction of his travels, he at length, in 1731,
brought out the first edition, which was attacked by Dr. Pococke in his
Description of the East. The numerous coins, busts, and other
antiquities which he had collected in his travels he bestowed upon the
university. Upon the death of Dr. Felton in 1740, he was nominated by
his college principal of St. Edmund Hall, which he raised from a ruinous
state by his munificence. He was at the same time presented to the
vicarage of Bramley, in Hampshire, and likewise enjoyed during the
remainder of his life the honour of being regius professor of Greek at
Oxford. He died in 1751, in the sixtieth year of his age, and was buried
at Bramley, where a monument was erected to his memory by his widow. The
_Shawia_ in botany received its name in honour of Dr. Shaw.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
FREDERIC HASSELQUIST.
Born 1722.—Died 1752.
HASSELQUIST was born on the 3d of January, 1722, at Isernvall, in
Eastern Gothland, in Sweden. His father, Andrew Hasselquist, who was the
clergyman of the place, died in great poverty while our traveller was
yet a youth; and to add still further to his misfortune, his mother
likewise was shortly afterward so extremely debilitated both in mind and
body as to be compelled to take refuge in the infirmary of Vastona.
Hasselquist would therefore in all probability have been condemned to a
life of obscurity and poverty had not M. Pontin, his maternal uncle,
undertaken the care of his education, and sent him with his own children
to the college of Linköping. But all the friends of Hasselquist seemed
destined to be short-lived. Not long after his entrance at college the
loss of this kind benefactor reduced him to the necessity of teaching
for a livelihood until he should be of the proper age to enter into the
university.
In 1741 he entered a student at the university of Upsal; but poverty,
which when not overwhelming acts as a spur to genius, was still his
faithful companion, and compelled him for a subsistence to exercise his
talents in the way of all others best calculated to give them amplitude
and vigour. He became a tutor. At the same time, however, he enjoyed the
advantage of attending the lectures of the various professors; and the
knowledge thus acquired was immediately digested, examined, and
enlarged, to be transmitted in other lectures to his own humble pupils.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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