Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/290

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Thorie
284
Thorie

daughter and coheir of Richard Sykes of Leeds. She died in 1740. Of his ten children, only two sons and a daughter survived him. The elder son, Ralph, was rector of Stoke Newington; the younger, Richard, was rector of St. Catherine's, Coleman Street, both preferments having been granted by their father's friend Gibson, bishop of London.

Thoresby was the first Yorkshire antiquary to publish a work of importance. He had access to the original material of his friends Torre, Johnston, Richardson, and Hopkinson, which exceeded that gathered by himself. He was no real scholar, somewhat inaccurate, and (possibly from his love of rarities) excessively credulous, but his extreme industry and the exercise of boundless curiosity rendered his ‘Ducatus’ a useful and important compilation. His diary is interesting, but its minute detail is wearisome. It was published in 1830, in two volumes, under the editorship of Joseph Hunter [q. v.] The title of the Yorkshire Pepys, which has been applied to Thoresby, is undeserved. He maintained a correspondence with Hearne, and several of his letters have been published in Hearne's ‘Collections’ (Oxford Historical Society's Publications).

There is a portrait of Thoresby by Parmentier, painted in 1703, in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries; an engraving by Deane is prefixed to Hunter's edition of Thoresby's ‘Diary.’ Another engraved portrait by Vertue, completed in 1712, is prefixed to the ‘Ducatus.’

[Article in Biogr. Brit. by Ralph Thoresby, his elder son; life of the author prefixed to Thoresby's Ducatus, ed. 1816 by J. D. Whitaker; Thoresby's Diary and Correspondence, ed. Hunter; Atkinson's Ralph Thoresby the Topographer; Derham's Physico-Theology, 1723, p. 174; Gent. Mag.; Nichols's Lit. Anecdotes; Gough's Anecdotes of Brit. Topography, ii. 436.]

W. C.-r.

THORIE or THORIUS, JOHN (fl. 1590–1611), translator, son of John Thorie, M.D. of Bailleul, Flanders, was born in 1568 in London. He matriculated from Christ Church, Oxford, on 1 Oct. 1586, having previously supplicated for the degree of B.A. on 15 April. ‘He was a person well skilled in certain tongues, and a noted poet of his time’ (Wood, Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, i. 624). Before 1593 he had formed a friendship with Gabriel Harvey [q. v.], who in that year dedicated to Thorie, Barnabe Barnes, and Anthony Chewt, his ‘Pierce's Supererogation,’ a reply to ‘Strange News’—an attack on him by Thomas Nash (1567–1601) [q. v.] Thorie has in it five sonnets and two commendatory letters (dated Oxford, 10 July and 3 Aug. 1593) to Harvey. He consequently came under the notice of Nash; the latter's sarcasms drove him to abandon Harvey, and in ‘Have with you to Saffron Walden’ (1596) Nashe wrote: ‘Of this John Thorius more sparingly will I speake, because he hath made his peace with me’ (Harvey, Works, ed. Grosart, vol. ii. passim; Nashe, Works, ed. Grosart, iii. 155, 200).

Thorie translated from the Spanish:

  1. ‘The Counseller by B. Philip,’ London, 1589, 4to, dedicated to John Fortescue, master of the queen's wardrobe (Brit. Mus.).
  2. ‘Corro's Spanish Grammar, with a Dictionarie adioyned vnto it,’ London, 1590, 4to.
  3. ‘The Sergeant-Major, by F. de Valdes,’ London, 1590, 4to, dedicated by Thorius to Sir John Norris [q. v.] He also has verses in Florio's ‘Queen Anna's New World of Words,’ 1611.

[Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1500–1714; Clark's Reg. of the Univ. of Oxford, II. ii. 154, iii. 138; Hazlitt's Handbook and Collections.]

E. C. M.

THORIUS, RAPHAEL, M.D. (d. 1625), physician, son of Francis Thorius, M.D., a French physician and Latin poet, was born in the Low Countries. He studied medicine at Oxford, but graduated M.D. at Leyden. He then began practice in London, for which invasion of privilege he was fined by the College of Physicians, but afterwards presented himself for examination, and was admitted a licentiate on 23 Dec. 1596. He resided in the parish of St. Benet Finck in London, and attained considerable practice. He wrote a Latin ode in 1603, exhorting his wife and family to leave London on account of the plague. He was fond of literature, and in 1610 wrote his ‘Hymnus Tabaci.’ The poem, of which there are two books, is in hexameters, and as an elegant composition containing many felicitous expressions deserves a place among the metrical works of physicians beside the ‘Syphilis’ of Hieronymus Frascastorius, to which perhaps the inception of the ‘Hymnus’ is due. He addresses Sir William Paddy, in 1610, president of the College of Physicians, as Frascastorius addresses Peter Bembo in the beginning of his poem. The commencement of the ‘Hymnus,’

Innocuos calices, et amicam vatibus herbam,
Vimque datam folio, et læti miracula fumi Aggredior,

not improbably suggested to William Cowper [q. v.] a well-known passage in ‘The Task.’

Thorius completed a revision of the poem with some additions on 18 Feb. 1625 (letter