Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Powys-Lybbe Forbears - Person Sheet
Birthca 1749
Death3 May 1824
GeneralProf of Greek at Cantab. Rector of Hemstead-with-Lessingham, Norfolk.
FatherRev Dr William Cooke D.D. (1711-1797)
DNB Main notes for Rev William Cooke
Co-subject: Cooke, William
Dates: c.1749-1824
Active Date: 1789
Gender: Male
Field of Interest: Scholarship and Languages
Occupation: Greek professor

Article
Another son, William Cooke, was fellow of King's College, Cambridge, professor of Greek at Cambridge from 1780 to 1792, and rector of Hempstead-with-Lessingham, Norfolk, from 1785 till his death, 3 May 1824. He published an edition of Aristotle's `Poetics' in 1785, to which was appended the first translation of Gray's `Elegy' into Greek verse, a performance which had many imitators at the time (Nichols, Lit. Anecd. ix. 154-5). Mathias praises Cooke's translation as equal to Bion or Moschus, and calls the author an `extraordinary genius' (Pursuits of Literature, Dial. iii.); but De Quincey in `Coleridge and Opium Eating' declares that `scores of modern schoolboys' could do as well. In 1789 he also published `A Dissertation on the Revelation of St. John,' comparing the Apocalypse to the `OEdipus Tyrannus' of Sophocles and to Homer. He verified the old saying as to the result of such studies by afterwards becoming deranged (Gent. Mag. for 1798, p. 774, and 1824, ii. 183).
Last Modified 6 Feb 2006Created 14 May 2022 by Tim Powys-Lybbe
Re-created by Tim Powys-Lybbe on 14 May 20220