to the commission for inquiring into non-parochial registers, a post which he retained until 1841. In that year he removed to 1 Copthall Court, Throgmorton Street, and entered into a partnership with Stacey Grimaldi and Henry Edward Stables, which lasted until 1847, when Grimaldi retired. In 1854 a new partner, Charles Tayler Ware, joined the firm, but in the following year, after Stables’s death on 13 Oct., Burn retired from practice.
In 1846 he issued his most important work, ‘The History of the French, Walloon, Dutch, and other Foreign Protestant Refugees settled in England’ (London, 8vo), which he compiled chiefly from the registers of their places of worship. The work is little more than a series of disjointed notes on the subject, but it contains a valuable historical summary of the facts contained in the documents in the possession of the foreign congregations in England.
After retiring from the practice of law. Burn went to reside at The Grove at Henley, and in 1861 he published ‘A History of Henley on Thames’ (London, 4to), a work of much research. In 1865 he produced ‘The High Commission’ (London, 4to), dedicated to Sir Charles George Young [q. v.], which consisted of a collection of notices of the court and its procedure drawn from various sources. Early in 1870 he issued a similar but more elaborate work on ‘The Star Chamber,’ which also contained some additional notes on the court of high commission.
Burn died at The Grove, Henley, on 15 June 1870. Besides the works already mentioned, he edited ‘The Marriage and Registrations Acts (6 and 7 William IV),’ London, 1836, 12mo.
[Burn’s Works; Law Lists; Notes and Queries, 4th ser. v. 611]
BURNE-JONES, Sir EDWARD COLEY (1833–1898), first baronet, painter, and at one time A.R.A., was born in Birmingham on 28 Aug. 1833. The name ‘Burne’ was really a baptismal name, but was adopted as part of the surname for convenience’ sake, when it had long been identified in the public mind with the work of the painter. His father, a man of Welsh descent, was Edward Richard Jones; the maiden name of his mother (who died when he was born) was Elizabeth Coley. In 1844 he entered King Edward’s School, Birmingham, while James Prince Lee [q. v.] was head-master. Few records remain of his school days. It is known that he was not strong enough to play games; that he
delighted in poetry and especially in Ossian; and that, although he became celebrated among the boys for drawing ‘devils,’ he showed none of Millais’s precocity in art. After passing through the usual school routine he matriculated in 1852 from Exeter College, Oxford, with the intention of taking orders in the church of England. But, though he was touched by the ecclesiastical spirit of the place, and used to attend the daily services at St. Thomas’s, he seems to have felt no real vocation for the clerical career; for, on the one hand, on the outbreak of the Crimean war he was extremely anxious to enter the army, and, on the other, his friendship with another Exeter undergraduate, also of Welsh nationality, William Morris [q. v. Suppl.], who was independently experiencing a like change of feeling, very soon led him away from the paths of divinity to those of literature and art. The story of this friendship and its results has been told at length in Mr. Mackail’s ‘Life of William Morris.’ It will suffice here to say that the two Exeter undergraduates, together with a small group of Birmingham men at Pembroke College and elsewhere, speedily formed a very close and intimate society, which they called ‘The Brotherhood.’ Among its members were R. W. Dixon and Edwin Hatch, William Fulford (afterwards editor of the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Magazine’), and Cormell Price of Brasenose, afterwards head-master of the college of Westward Ho, and among the most intimate of Burne-Jones’s lifelong friends. The brotherhood was stirred by a little ‘Romantic Movement’ of its own; it read Ruskin and Tennyson; it visited churches, worshipped the middle ages, and finally founded the magazine just mentioned, which is now almost as much prized by votaries of English Pre-Raphaelitism as ‘The Germ’ itself.
At that time neither Burne-Jones nor Morris knew Rossetti personally, but both were much influenced by certain illustrations signed by the elder painter; and the impulse derived from these was strengthened by opportunity afforded of seeing and studying the pictures of Mr. Combe, at that time head of the Clarendon Press—an enthusiastic collector of works by the Pre-Raphaelites. At Mr. Combe’s house Burne-Jones saw some at least of the pictures, now given to the university galleries and to Keble College, which were disturbing old prejudices, and arousing the passionate admiration of certain enthusiasts of the day: Holman Hunt’s ‘Light of the World,’ Millais’s ‘Return of the Dove to the Ark,’ and Rossetti’s ‘Birthday of Beatrice.’ These things and Ruskin, and a
