Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/366

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view of Ireland. He remitted the fees of his office to widows and made many gifts to royalists who had been ruined during the great rebellion.

He died at his family house in Castle Street, Dublin, on 1 Dec. 1666, and was buried in St. Werburgh's Church, Dublin.

The establishment of Irish history and literature as subjects of study in the general world of learning in modern times is largely due to the lifelong exertions of Ware, and Sir Frederick Burton in his fine drawing of the three founders of the study of Irish history and literature, has rightly placed him beside his contemporaries, Michael O'Clery [q. v.], the hereditary chronicler, and John Colgan [q. v.], the Irish hagiologist. Ware's portrait was also engraved by Vertue. The Earl of Clarendon, lord-lieutenant of Ireland in 1686, purchased his manuscripts, part of which are now in the British Museum (Clarendon collection) and part in the Bodleian Library (Rawlinson collection). A catalogue of them was printed in Dublin in 1688, and one in London in 1690.

His eldest son, James, who became auditor-general on his father's death, died in 1689.

His second son, Robert, married on 24 Dec. 1666, Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Piers of Tristernagh, co. Westmeath. He compiled ‘The Hunting of the Romish Fox,’ an account of the change of religion and of the persecution of Roman catholics in England and Ireland, of which the title is borrowed from the book of William Turner (d. 1568) [q. v.] It was published in Dublin in 1683 by William Norman, bookbinder to the Duke of Ormonde. Ware defaced some of his father's manuscripts with controversial scribblings. He died in March 1696.

Walter Harris [q. v.], who married Ware's granddaughter, published ‘The Whole Works of Sir James Ware’ (Dublin, 1739–64, 3 vols. fol.).

[Life, prefixed to English translation of Ware's Works (most of which were published in Latin), London, 1705; Harris's edition of Ware; Cal. State Papers, Ireland, 1588–1624; Works (of the editions there is a fine series in the Bradshaw collection in the Cambridge University Library); Catalogues Clarendon manuscripts and Rawlinson manuscripts; Publications of the Celtic Soc. Dublin, 1848.]

N. M.

WARE, JAMES (1756–1815), surgeon, born at Portsmouth on 11 Feb. 1756, was son of Martin Ware, who was successively the master shipbuilder of the royal dockyards of Sheerness, Plymouth, and Deptford. James Ware was educated at the Portsmouth grammar school, and went upon trial to Ramsay Karr, surgeon of the King's Yard in Portsmouth on 3 July 1770. He was bound apprentice to Karr on 2 March 1771, to serve for five years from the previous July. During his apprenticeship he attended the practice of the surgeons at the Haslar Naval Hospital, and, having served a part of his time, his master allowed him, as was then the usual custom, to come to London for the purpose of attending the medical and surgical practice of one of the general hospitals. Ware selected St. Thomas's, and entered himself as a student on 25 Sept. 1773. Here he remained for three years, making such progress that Joseph Else appointed him in 1776 his demonstrator of anatomy. On 1 Jan. 1777 he began to act as assistant to Jonathan Wathen, a surgeon who devoted himself principally to diseases of the eye; and on 25 March 1778 he entered into partnership with Wathen, taking a fourth share. The partnership was dissolved in 1791, after which Ware began to practise upon his own account, chiefly but not entirely in ophthalmic surgery. In 1788 he became one of the founders of the Society for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Medical Men in London and its vicinity, a society of which he was chosen president in 1809. In 1800 he founded the school for the indigent blind, in imitation of a similar institution which had been established at Liverpool ten years earlier. He was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries on 18 Jan. 1798, and on 11 March 1802 he was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society.

He practised his profession in New Bridge Street, and died at his country house at Turnham Green on 13 April 1815. He was buried in the family tomb in the Bunhill Fields burial-ground. He married, in 1787, the widow of N. Polhill, and daughter of Robert Maitland, by whom he had a large family of sons and daughters.

It is the peculiar merit of Wathen and of his pupil Ware that they elevated ophthalmic surgery from the degraded condition into which it had fallen. Originally a branch of general surgery, but always invaded by quacks, it fell into dishonest hands, from which the disinterested efforts of men like Ware first rescued it.

A half-length oil painting, by M. Brown, is in the possession of James T. Ware, esq., F.R.C.S. Engl., of Tilford, Surrey. It was engraved by H. Cook, and a copy of the engraving is prefixed to Pettigrew's ‘Life of Ware,’ as well as to the notice of Ware in the ‘New European Magazine’ for 1815.

Ware published: 1. ‘Remarks on the