DAVIDSON, SAMUEL (1807–1898), Irish biblical scholar, was born near Ballymena in Ireland. He was educated at the Royal College of Belfast, entered the Presbyterian ministry in 1835, and was appointed professor of biblical criticism at his own college. Becoming a Congregationalist, he accepted in 1842 the chair of biblical criticism, literature and oriental languages at the Lancashire Independent College at Manchester; but he was obliged to resign in 1857, being brought into collision with the college authorities by the publication of an introduction to the Old Testament entitled The Text of the Old Testament, and the Interpretation of the Bible, written for a new edition of Horne’s Introduction to the Sacred Scripture. Its liberal tendencies caused him to be accused of unsound views, and a most exhaustive report prepared by the Lancashire College committee was followed by numerous pamphlets for and against. After his resignation a fund of £3000 was subscribed as a testimonial by his friends. In 1862 he removed to London to become scripture examiner in London University, and he spent the rest of his life in literary work. He died on the 1st of April 1898. Davidson was a member of the Old Testament Revision Committee. Among his principal works are:—Sacred Hermeneutics Developed and Applied (1843), rewritten and republished as A Treatise on Biblical Criticism (1852), Lectures on Ecclesiastical Polity (1848), An Introduction to the New Testament (1848–1851), The Hebrew Text 'of the Old Testament Revised (1855), Introduction to the Old Testament (1862), On a Fresh Revision of the Old Testament (1873), The Canon of the Bible (1877), The Doctrine of Last Things in the New Testament (1883), besides translations of the New Testament from Von Tischendorf’s text, Gieseler’s Ecclesiastical History (1846) and Fürst’s Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon.
DAVIDSON, THOMAS (1817–1885), British palaeontologist, was born in Edinburgh on the 17th of May 1817. His parents possessed considerable landed property in Midlothian. Educated partly in the university at Edinburgh and partly in France, Italy and Switzerland, and early acquiring an interest in natural history, he benefited greatly by acquaintance with foreign languages and literature, and with men of science in different countries. He was induced in 1837, through the influence of Leopold von Buch, to devote his special attention to the brachiopoda, and in course of time he became the highest authority on this group. The great task of his life was the Monograph of British Fossil Brachiopoda, published by the Palaeontographical Society (1850–1886). This work, with supplements, comprises six quarto volumes with more than 200 plates drawn on stone by the author. He also prepared an exhaustive memoir on “Recent Brachiopoda,” published by the Linnean Society. He was elected F.R.S. in 1857. He was awarded in 1865 the Wollaston medal by the Geological Society of London, and in 1870 a Royal medal by the Royal Society; and in 1882 the degree of LL.D. was conferred upon him by the university of St Andrews. He died at Brighton on the 14th of October 1885, bequeathing his fine collection of recent and fossil brachiopoda to the British Museum.
See biography with portrait and list of papers in Geol. Mag. for 1871, p. 145.
DAVIES, DAVID CHARLES (1826–1891), Welsh nonconformist divine, was born at Aberystwyth on the 11th of May 1826, his father being a merchant and a pioneer of Welsh Methodism, his mother a niece of Thomas Charles (q.v.) of Bala. He was educated in his native town by a noted schoolmaster, John Evans, at Bala College, and at University College, London, where he graduated B.A. in 1847 and M.A. (in mathematics) in 1849. He had already begun to preach, and after an evangelistic tour in South Wales supplied the pulpit of the English presbyterian church at Newtown for six months, and settled as pastor of the bilingual church at Builth in 1851. He returned to this charge after a pastorate at Liverpool (1853–1856), left it again in 1858 for Newtown, and went in May 1859 to the Welsh church at Jewin Crescent, London. Here he remained until 1876, and from that date till 1882, although living at Bangor for reasons of health, had the chief oversight of the church. In 1888 he accepted the principalship of the Calvinistic Methodist College at Trevecca in Brecknockshire. His work here was successful, but short; he died at Bangor on the 26th of September 1891, and was buried at Aberystwyth.
Though Davies stood somewhat apart from the main currents of thought both without and within his church, and was largely unknown to English audiences or readers, he exercised a strong influence on Welsh life and thought in the 19th century. He was a serious student, especially of anti-theistic positions, a good speaker, and a frequent contributor to Welsh theological journals. Several of his articles have been collected and published, the most noteworthy being expositions on The First Epistle of John (1889), Ephesians (2 vols., 1896, 1901), Psalms (1897), Romans (1902); and The Atonement and Intercession of Christ (1899, English trans. by D. E. Jenkins, 1901).
DAVIES, SIR JOHN (1569–1626), English philosophical poet, was baptized on the 16th of April 1569, at Tisbury, Wiltshire, where his parents lived at the manor-house of Chicksgrove. He was educated at Winchester College, and became a commoner of Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1585. In 1588 he entered the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar in 1595. In his general onslaught on literature in 1599 the archbishop of Canterbury ordered to be burnt the notorious and now excessively rare volume, All Ovid’s Elegies, 3 Bookes, by C. M. Epigrams by J. D. (Middleburgh, 1598 ?), which contained posthumous work by Marlowe. The epigrams by Davies, although not devoid of wit, were coarse enough to deserve their fate. It is probable that they were earlier in date of composition than the charming fragment entitled Orchestra (1596), written in praise of dancing. The poet, in the person of Antinoüs, tries to induce Penelope to dance by arguing that all harmonious natural processes partake of the nature of a conscious and well-ordered dance. He closes his argument by foreshadowing in a magic mirror the revels of the court of Cynthia (Elizabeth). Orchestra was dedicated to the author’s “very friend, Master Richard Martin,” but in the next year the friends quarrelled, and Davies was expelled from the society for having struck Martin with a cudgel in the hall of the Middle Temple. He spent the year after his expulsion at Oxford in the composition of his philosophical poem on the nature of the soul and its immortality—Nosce teipsum (1599). The style of the work was entirely novel; and the stanza in which it was written—the decasyllabic quatrain with alternate rhymes—had never been so effectively handled. Its force, eloquence and ingenuity, the orderly and lucid arrangement of its matter, place it among the finest of English didactic poems. In 1599 he also published a volume of twenty-six graceful acrostics on the words Elisabetha Regina, entitled Hymns to Astraea. He produced no more poetry except his contributions to Francis Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody (1608). These were two dialogues which had been written as entertainments for the queen, and “Yet other Twelve Wonders of the World,” satirical epigrams on the courtier, the divine, the maid, &c., and “A Hymn in praise of Music.” Ten sonnets to Philomel are signed J. D., and are assigned to Davies (Poetical Rhapsody, ed. A. H. Bullen, 1890). In 1601 Davies was restored to his position at the bar, after making his apologies to Martin, and in the same year he sat for Corfe Castle in parliament. James I. received the author of Nosce teipsum with great favour, and sent him (1603) to Ireland as solicitor-general, conferring the honour of knighthood upon him in the same year. In 1606 he was promoted to be attorney-general for Ireland, and created serjeant-at-arms. Of the difficulties in the way of the prosecution of his work, and his untiring industry in overcoming them, there is abundant evidence in his letters to Cecil preserved in the State Papers on Ireland. One of his chief aims was to establish the Protestant religion firmly in Ireland, and he took strict measures to enforce the law for attendance at church. With the same end in view he took an active part in the “plantation” of Ulster. In 1612 he published his prose Discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued untill the beginning of his Majestie’s happie raigne.[1] In the same year he entered the Irish parliament as member for Fermanagh, and was elected speaker after a scene of disorder in which the
- ↑ Edited by Henry Morley in his Ireland under Elizabeth and James I. (1890).
