CARY, Henry Francis, English clergy man, translator- of Dante: b. Gibraltar, Spain, 6 Dec. 1772; d. London, 14 Aug. 1844. In 1790 he entered Christ Church, Oxford, and he took orders in 1796. In 1796 he was presented to the vicarage of Abbot's Bromley, Staffordshire, and in 1800 he removed to Kingsbury, in War wickshire, another living to which he had been presented. His studies while at college had em braced a wide range of Italian, French and English literature, and in 1805 he gave proof of his Italian scholarship, as well as of his poetic powers, by the publication of the 'Inferno> of Dante in English blank-verse, accompanied by the Italian text. The entire translation of the Commedia> was accomplished in 1814, and the work was now published complete, but it lay unnoticed for several years, till Sanuel Taylor Coleridge drew attention to its merits. It has since been recognized as a standard Eng lish work. Cary subsequently translated the
'Birds' of Aristophanes (1824), and the 'Odes' of Pindar, and wrote a continuation of John son's 'Lives of the English Poets,' and a series of 'Lives of Early French Poets.> He was for some time curate of the Savoy, London, and in 1826 was appointed assistant keeper of printed books in the British Museum, which office he resigned in consequence of his being passed by on the appointment of Mr. Panizzi in 1837 to the office of keeper of the printed books. The government in 1841 granted him a pension of 1200 a year as a recognition of his literary abilities, and he devoted himself hence forth to the annotation of a new edition of his translation of Dante, and to editions of the English poets, Pope, Cowper, Milton, Young, etc. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. His son, Henry Cary, has written a 'Memoir' (London 1847).