James
Merrick: poet, scholar, and linguist?
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
University ofLeiden
In the preface to the
first edition of his grammar, Robert Lowth asked for comments from his readers,
as a result of which he hoped that the grammar would be “improved into
something really useful”. A number of people appear to have responded, and one
of them was James Merrick (1720-1769), classical scholar and author of a
metrical version of the Psalms (1765). Merrick asked Lowth, who had been
Professor of Poetry in Oxford from 1741
to 1750, to read his translations critically, and in the course of their
resulting correspondence they had several discussion about questions of
grammatical correctness. In my article I will analyse these discussion, and I
will show that by modern criteria Merrick can be considered to have been the
better linguist of the two.