Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Russell, Thomas (1762-1788)
RUSSELL, THOMAS (1762–1788), poet, second son of John Russell (1725–1808), a prosperous attorney of Beaminster in Dorset, by his wife Virtue (1743–1768), daughter of Richard Brickle of Shaftesbury, was born at Beaminster in January or February 1762 (baptised 2 March). His father's family had been for generations merchants and shipowners at Weymouth. His elder brother, John Banger, had antiquarian tastes, and contributed to the second edition of Hutchins's ‘Dorset’ (1796–1803). After attending the grammar school at Bridport, he entered Winchester as a commoner in 1777, and before the end of the year was already in sixth book and fifteenth boy in the school. In 1778 he entered college, and next year was senior in the school; he gained medals for Latin verse and Latin essay (1778–9), and was elected to New College in 1780, being second on the roll. He graduated B.A. in October 1784, was ordained deacon in 1785, and priest in 1786. In the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ (1782, p. 574, and 1783, i. 124), under the signature ‘A. S.,’ he wrote two erudite papers on the poetry of Mosen Jordi and the Provençal language, defending his former master, Thomas Warton, against Ritson's ill-tempered ‘Observations’ upon the ‘History of Poetry.’ A career of brilliant promise was cut short by phthisis, of which Russell died at Bristol Hotwells on 31 July 1788. He was buried in the churchyard of Powerstock, Dorset, a mural tablet being erected to his memory in the tower of the church. Until shortly before his death he was engaged in correcting his poems. He left a few fragments in manuscript, now in the possession of Captain Thomas Russell of Beaminster.
In 1789 appeared ‘Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems by the late Thomas Russell, Fellow of New College,’ Oxford, sm. 4to; these were dedicated to Warton by the editor, William Howley, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. A fine scholarly taste is exhibited in the versions from Petrarch, Camoens, and Weisse, but the most noteworthy feature of the little volume is the excellence of Russell's sonnets. Together with William Lisle Bowles, a fellow-Wykehamist of kindred sympathies, he may claim an important place in the revival of the sonnet in England. Wordsworth not only wrotewith warm appreciation of Russell's genius as a sonneteer (cf. Prose Works, ed. Grosart, 1876, iii. 333), but in his sonnet, ‘Iona (upon landing),’ he adopted from Russell, as conveying his feeling better than any words of his own could do (Poet. Works, 1869, p. 356), the four concluding lines:
And ‘hopes, perhaps, more heavenly bright than thine,
A grace by thee unsought and unpossest,
A faith more fixed, a rapture more divine
Shall gild their passage to eternal rest.’
Another sonnet of Russell's seems to have suggested an exquisite passage in Byron's ‘O snatch'd away in beauty's bloom;’ of a third, ‘supposed to be written at Lemnos,’ Landor wrote that it alone authorised Russell to join the shades of Sophocles and Euripides. Coleridge, Cary, and Bowles applaud this ‘Miltonic’ sonnet, which finds a place in the anthologies of Dyce, Capel Lofft, Tomlinson, Main, Hall Caine, and William Sharp. Southey in his ‘Vision of Judgment’ associated Russell with Chatterton and Bampfylde among the young spirits whom the muses ‘marked for themselves at birth and with dews from Castalia sprinkled.’ He lacked the originality of genius, but, says Cary, ‘his ear was tuned to the harmonies of Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, and fragments of their sounds he gives us back as from an echo, but so combined as to make a sweet music of his own’ (Cary, Memoir, 1847, ii. 297–8). The Oxford edition of Russell's sonnets is scarce, but his remains are printed in Thomas Park's ‘Collection of British Poets,’ 1808, vol. xli., in Sanford's ‘British Poets,’ 1819, xxxvii., and in the Chiswick edition of the ‘British Poets,’ 1822, lxxiii.
[Gent. Mag. 1788 ii. 752, and 1847 i. 358; Foster's Alumni Oxon. 1715–1886; Kirby's Winchester Scholars, p. 270; Hutchins's Dorset, ii. 321–2; Lounger's Common Place Book, 1805, iii. 121; Brydges's Censura Literaria, i. 320; Southey's Poetical Works, 1845, p. 784; Bowles's Clifden Grove; Forster's Life of Landor, 1869, i. 194, ii. 8; Warton's Hist. of Poetry, ed. Mant, and also ed. Hazlitt; Dyce's Specimens of English Sonnets, 1833; Notes and Queries, 4th ser. x. 472, xi. 23, 8th ser. ix. 145, 214, 450; family papers through Captain Thomas Russell of Beaminster; notes kindly furnished by Mr. C. W. Holgate of The Close, Salisbury; Wykehamist, 31 July 1888 (containing a memoir by Mr. C. W. Holgate).]