LYE, EDWARD, an English clergyman, distinguished by the attention which be paid to the Saxon and Gothic languages and litera ture, was born at Totnees in 1704. Ho was educated in the University of Oxford, and received the living of Houghton Parva iu Northamp tonshire, which he exchanged for that of Yardley Hastings. This appears to have been all the preferment ho enjoyed. He died in 1767.
The publications of Lye are all in that rare department of literature to which he especially devoted himself. The first was an edition of the manuscript left by Francis Junius Reines], entitled Etyma logicum Anglicanum.' This manuscript had long lain in the Bodleian Library, no one having the courage or the knowledge and leisure sufficient to undertake the publication of it, to the great regret of all scholars both at home and abroad. This Lye accomplished, and the work appeared, with some additions and suitable prolegomena, in a folio volume, 1743. He also published, at the desire of Berzeliva,
bishop of Upsal, nu edition of that singular remain of the Gothic language, the parent of many dialects;the translation of the Evange lists, commonly called Ulphilaa's version. During the whole course of his studies he had kept in view the preparation of a large dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon and Gothio languages. This great undertaking be had just completed, having actually delivered the manuscript to the printer, when death took him away. His labour however was not lost, the work being published in 1772 in two folio volumes. There is fuller account of this eminent person in Nichola's Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century,' vol. ix., pp. 751-753.