HARRISON, WILLIAM , English topographer and antiquary, was born in London on April 8, 1534. He was in ducted early in 1559 to the rectory of Radwinter, Essex, on the presentation of Sir William Brooke, Lord Cobham, to whom he had formerly acted as chaplain; and from 1571 to 1581 he held from another patron, Francis de la Wood, the living of Wimbish in the same county. He became canon of Windsor in 1586, and his death and burial are noted in the chapter book of St. George's chapel on April His famous and amusing Description of England was under taken for the queen's printer, Reginald Wolfe, who designed the publication of "an universall cosmographie of the whole world . . . with particular histories of every knowne nation." After Wolfe's death in 1576 this comprehensive plan was reduced to descriptions and histories of England, Scotland and Ireland. The historical section was be supplied by Raphael Holinshed, the topographical by Harrison. The work was eventually published as The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland . . . by Raphael Holinshed and others, and was printed in two black-letter folio volumes in 1577. Harrison's Description of England, humbly described as his "foule frizeled treatise," and dedicated to his patron Cobham, is an invaluable survey of the condition of Eng land under Elizabeth, in all its political, religious and social as pects. He is properly contemptuous of the snobbery that was even then characteristic of English society; but his account of "how gentlemen are made in England" must be read in full to be ap preciated. He is especially instructive on the condition and serv ices of the church immediately after the Reformation ; notably in the fact that, though an ardent Protestant, he is quite unconscious of any breach of continuity in the life and organization of the Church of England. Harrison also contributed the translation from Scots into English of Bellenden's version of Hector Boece's Latin Description of Scotland.