TRAHERNE, THOMAS (1637?-1674), English writer, was, according to Anthony a Wood, a "shoemaker's son of Here ford." He entered Brasenose college, Oxford, in 1652, and after receiving his degree in 1656 took holy orders. In the following year he was appointed rector of Credenhill, near Hereford, and in 1661 received his M.A. degree. He found a good patron in Sir Orlando Bridgeman, lord keeper of the seals from 1667 to 1672. Traherne became his domestic chaplain and also "minister" of Teddington. He died at Bridgeman's house at Teddington on or about Sept. 27, 1674. He led, we are told, a simple and devout life and was well read in primitive antiquity and the fathers. His prose works are Roman Forgeries (1673), Christian Ethics (1675), and A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mer cies of God (1699). His poems have a curious history. They were left in ms. and presumably passed with the rest of his library into the hands of his brother Philip. They then became apparently
the possession of the Skipps of Ledbury, Herefordshire.
In 1896 or 1897 they were discovered by W. T. Brooke in a street bookstall. Dr. Grosart bought them, and proposed to in clude them in his edition of the works of Henry Vaughan, to whom he was disposed to assign them. He left this task uncompleted, and Bertram Dobell (q.v.), who eventually secured the mss., was able to establish the authorship of Thomas Traherne.
The discovery included, beside the poems, four complete "Cen turies of Meditation," short paragraphs embodying reflections on religion.
See Bertram Dobell's editions of the Poetical Works (1906) , and the Centuries of Meditation (1908 and 1927) ; H. I. Bell's edition of the Poems of Felicity (Oxford, 191o) ; and G. E. Willett, Traherne: an essay (Cambridge, 1919).