MILMAN, HENRY HART English historian and ecclesiastic, third son of Sir Francis Milman, Bart., physician to George III., was born in London on Nov. Io, 1791. He was educated at Eton and at Brasenose college, Oxford. He gained the Newdigate prize with a poem on the Apollo Belvidere in 1812, was elected a fellow of Brasenose in 1814, and in 1816 won the English essay prize with his Comparative Estimate of Sculpture and Painting. In 1816 he was ordained, and two years later was presented to the living of St. Mary's, Reading. Milman's early work included tragedies, epic poems, hymns and translations from the classics. In 1821 he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford.
Turning to another field, Milman published in 1829 his History of the Jews, which is memorable as the first by an English clergy man which treated the Jews as an oriental tribe, recognized sheikhs and amirs in the Old Testament, sifted and classified documen tary evidence, and evaded or minimized the miraculous. In con
sequence, his inevitable preferment was delayed. In 1835, however, Sir Robert Peel made him rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, and canon of Westminster, and in 1849 he became dean of St. Paul's. By this time Milman was generally revered and beloved. His History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire (1840) had been ignored; but his reputation was fully established by the continuation of that work, his History of Latin Christianity (1855), which has passed through many edi tions. In 1838 he had edited Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and in the following year published his Life of Gibbon. Milman died on Sept. 24, 1868, and was buried in St. Paul's cathedral.
See A. C. Tait, Sermon in Memory of H. H. Milman (1868), and A. Milman, H. H. Milman See also the Memoirs of R. Milman, bishop of Calcutta, by his sister, Frances Maria Milman (1879).