lay, which he designed a little before his death to arrange in three folio volumes on the plan of Bishop Kennett's ‘Parochial Antiquities.’ He intended in particular to publish what he called a ‘History of the Vale of Evesham.’ Graves gave Thomas Hearne, his Oxford friend, several manuscripts annotated by himself and edited by Hearne. Hearne (Reliquiæ Hearnianæ, 2nd ed. iii. 31) commends his modesty, sweetness of temper, and kindness to his tenants and the poor. He died suddenly at Mickleton on 18 Sept. 1729, and was buried in the north aisle of the parish church. By his wife, Elizabeth, daughter and coheiress of Thomas Morgan, he left four sons and two daughters. His collections passed by purchase to his friend James West, P.R.S., who composed an epitaph for his monument in Mickleton Church, and after West's death in 1773 were bought by the Earl of Shelburne. One volume, a manuscript collection of notes on the history of his own family and the parish of Mickleton, which remains at Mickleton Manor, has been seriously damaged by a fire, but shows him to have been a painstaking and conscientious antiquary. Graves had also a cabinet of about five hundred coins, chiefly Greek and Roman, which were purchased after his death by another friend, Roger Gale [q. v.] His second son, the Rev. Richard Graves the younger [q. v.], is said to have sketched his father in the ‘Spiritual Quixote’ under the name of ‘Mr. Townsend.’ His portrait has been engraved by Vertue.
[Notes kindly supplied by Sidney Graves Hamilton, esq.; Nichols's Lit. Anecd. ii. 467–9; Nash's Worcestershire, i. 198, 199; Reliquiæ Hearnianæ (2nd ed.), ii. 196, 200, 264, 314, iii. 31, 80.]
GRAVES, RICHARD, the younger (1715–1804), poet and novelist, second son of Richard Graves the elder [q. v.] of Mickleton, Gloucestershire, was born there on 4 May 1715. At first he was taught in his father's house by a curate named Smith, with whom he read Hesiod and Homer when but twelve years old, and at the age of thirteen he was sent to the grammar school at Abingdon. Becoming ‘a pretty good Grecian’ he gained a scholarship at Pembroke College, Oxford, and matriculated on 7 Nov. 1732. Among his college friends were Blackstone, Jago, Hawkins, the professor of poetry, all of whom dabbled in rhyme, and Shenstone, afterwards his close friend. George Whitefield was a servitor of Pembroke College, and they took the degree of B.A. on the same day, in July 1736. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship at All Souls' College, when he proceeded to London to study medicine. He attended the lectures of Dr. Frank Nicholls on anatomy, but was prostrated by a nervous fever. He returned to Oxford, and, having taken his master's degree in 1740, was duly ordained. The donative of Tissington in Derbyshire was bestowed upon him by William Fitzherbert, the friend of Dr. Johnson, and for three years Graves was family chaplain at Tissington Hall, where he rambled through the district described in his principal novel, and made the acquaintance of Pratt, afterwards Lord Camden, Sir Edward Wilmot, Nicholas Hardinge, and other distinguished persons. After resigning this charge he made a tour in the north, and at Scarborough met a distant relative, Samuel Knight, archdeacon of Berkshire, and the author of the ‘Life of Colet.’ Knight obtained for him the curacy of Aldworth, near Reading, where the parish registers show him to have been in residence in 1744. As the parsonage was out of repair he lived in the house of a gentleman farmer, Mr. Bartholomew of Dunworth. There he fell in love with and married his host's youngest daughter Lucy, a beautiful but uneducated girl of about sixteen. About 1748 he sent her to London, where she is reported to have acquired good manners and needful knowledge. This marriage lost him his fellowship and offended his relations. He was very poor until, through the interest of Sir Edward Harvey of Langley, near Uxbridge, he was presented in 1748 by William Skrine to the rectory of Claverton, near Bath. He was inducted in July 1749, and came into residence in 1750, and until his death was never absent for a month together from this living. Ralph Allen obtained for him in 1763 the adjoining vicarage of Kilmersdon, and through the same influence Graves was appointed chaplain to the Countess of Chatham. About 1793 he took the rectory of Croscombe, also in Somersetshire, but held it only as a ‘warming-pan.’ He purchased the advowson of Claverton from Allen's representatives in 1767, but afterwards resold it to them. The old rectory house had been built in part by Ralph Allen in 1760, but enlarged by Graves. It is described as ‘a pretty rural spot,’ marked by ‘classic elegance of taste.’ Graves for thirty years took pupils, whom he educated with his own children. Until his parsonage house was enlarged he rented from Mrs. Warburton for sixty pounds a year ‘the great house at Claverton, and the great gallery-library was turned into a dormitory.’ His pupils included Ralph Allen Warburton, the bishop's only son; Henry Skrine of Warleigh, who in his book on the ‘Rivers of Great Britain’ praises the ‘little grounds’
