BARNES, WILLIAM (1800-1886), the Dorsetshire poet, was born on Feb. 22 1800, at Rushay, near Pentridge, in Dorset shire, the son of John Barnes and Grace Scott, of the farmer class. He was a delicate child, in direct contrast to a strong race of for bears, and inherited from his mother a refined, retiring disposition and a love for books. He went to school at Sturminster Newton, where he was considered the clever boy of the school ; and when a solicitor named Dashwood applied to the master for a quick witted boy to join him as pupil Barnes was selected for the post. He worked with the village parson in his spare hours at classics and studied music under the organist. In 1818 he left Sturminster for the office of one Coombs at Dorchester, where he continued his evening education with another kindly clergy man. He also made great progress in the art of wood-engraving, and with the money he received for a series of blocks for a work called Walks about Dorchester he printed and published his first book, Orra, a Lapland Tale, in 1822. In the same year he became engaged to Julia Miles, the daughter of an excise officer. In 1823 he took a school at Mere in Wiltshire, and four years later married and settled in Chantey House, a fine old Tudor mansion in that town. He moved his school to Dorchester in 1835 and continued to conduct it until 1862, although he had become vicar of Whitcombe in 1847. From 1862 onwards he was rector of Winterborne Came, where he died on Oct. 7 1886. In 1833 he began his poems in the Dorsetshire dialect, among them the two eclogues "The 'Lotments" and "A Bit o'Sly Coorten," in the pages of the local paper. His volumes of verse are Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, two series 1844 and 1862, Hwomely Rhymes (18S9), and Poems of Rural Life in Common English (1868). They were collected in a single volume in 1879. His poetry is essentially English in character; no other writer has given quite so simple and sincere a picture of the homely life and labour of rural England. His work is full of humour, and its rusticity is allied to a literary sense and to high technical finish.
Barnes was a lifelong student of philology and published in 1854 a Philological Grammar, in which he drew examples from more than 6o languages. His original and suggestive books on the English language, which are valuable in spite of their eccen tricities, include Se Ge f ylsta: an Anglo-Saxon Delectus (1849); Tiw (1862) ; A Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (1864) ; An Outline of English Speech-Craft (18 78) ; and A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect (Dorchester, 1886).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—See The Life of William Barnes, Poet and PhiloloBibliography.—See The Life of William Barnes, Poet and Philolo- gist (1887) , by his daughter, Lucy E. Baxter, who is known as a writer on art by the pseudonym of Leader Scott, and a notice by Thomas Hardy in the Athenaeum (Oct. 16, 1886) .