PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER ( , English critic and poet, eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave (q.v.), was born at Great Yarmouth, on Sept. 28, 1824. He was educated at Charterhouse, and at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1846 he inter rupted his university career to serve as assistant private secretary to Gladstone, but returned to Oxford the next year, and took a first class in Literae Humaniores. From 1847 to 1862 he was fellow of Exeter College, and in 1849 entered the Education Department at Whitehall. In 185o he became vice-principal of Kneller Hall Training College at Twickenham. There he came into contact with Tennyson, and laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship. When the training college was abandoned, Palgrave returned to Whitehall in 1855, becoming examiner in the Educa tion Department, and eventually assistant secretary. He married, in 1862, Cecil Grenville Milnes, daughter of James Milnes-Gas kell. In 1885 he succeeded John Campbell Shairp as professor of poetry at Oxford. He died in London on Oct. 24, 1897. Pal grave published some volumes of poetry, Visions of England, (1880-81), Amenophis (1892), and others; but his work as a critic was by far the more important. His Landscape in Poetry
(1897) showed wide knowledge and critical appreciation of one of the most attractive aspects of poetic interpretation.
But Palgrave's principal contribution to the development of literary taste was contained in his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and fol lowed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed. Palgrave followed it with a Treasury of Sacred Song (1889), and a second series of the Golden Treasury (1897), in cluding the work of later poets, but in neither of these was quite the same exquisiteness of judgment preserved.
Among his other works were The Passionate Pilgrim (1858) , a volume of selections from Herrick entitled Chrysomela (1877), a memoir of Clough (1862) and a critical essay on Scott (1866). See Gwenllian F. Palgrave, F. T. Palgrave (1899).