Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Tytler, Henry William

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800538Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 57 — Tytler, Henry William1899Edward Irving Carlyle

TYTLER, HENRY WILLIAM (1752–1808), physician and translator, born at Fearn, Forfarshire, in 1752, was the younger brother of James Tytler [q. v.], and the son of George Tytler (d. 1785), minister of Fearn, by his wife, Janet Robertson. In 1793 he published the ‘Works of Callimachus translated into English Verse; the Hymns and Epigrams from the Greek, with the Coma Berenices from the Latin of Catullus,’ which is said to be the first translation of a Greek poet by a native of Scotland. They were reprinted in ‘Bohn's Classical Library’ (1856). In 1797, Tytler, who had graduated M.D., published ‘Pædotrophia, or the Art of Nursing and Rearing Children: a Poem in three books,’ translated from the Latin of Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, with medical and historical notes. He published in 1804 a ‘Voyage from the Cape of Good Hope.’ He also completed a translation of the seventeen books of the ‘Poem of Silius Italicus on the Punic War,’ which was not published. Tytler died at Edinburgh on 22 July 1808.

[Anderson's Scottish Nation; British Critic, xi. 70; Gent. Mag. 1808, ii. 852; Scott's Fasti Eccl. Scoticanæ, III. ii. 831.]

E. I. C.