GRANGER, REV. JAMES. So little is known of the personal history of Granger, that even the date of his birth appears to be unrecorded. He studied at Christchurch, Oxford, and was presented to the vicarage of Shiplake, in Oxfordshire, where, according to the dedication of the work which brought him into notice, he had " the good fortune to retire early to independence, obscurity, and content." This work, which must have occupied many years of preparatory labour, is entitled 'A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution ; consisting of characters disposed in different classes, and adapted to a methodical Catalogue of engraved British Heads; intended as en Essay towards reducing our Biography to system, and a help to the knowledge of Portraits.' The first edition appeared in 1769, in 2 quarto vole., each forming two parts, so that it is often described as in four volumes. Some copies of this edition were printed upon one side of the paper only, to leave room for manuscript notes, or for the insertion of illustrations. In 1774 appeared, in the same size, a Supplement' of corrections and additions, iu one volume, which was incorporated in the second edition of the whole work, in 4 vole., 8vo, in 1775. A fifth edition, with upwards of 4000 additioual lives, appeared in 1824, in 6 thin royal octavo vole. Granger made considerable progress in the preparation of a continuation of the work, and there are extensive manuscript collections in the British Museum, which were formed by his friend Sir William Musgrave to assist him in this object, but he did not live to complete it; and the continuation, which extends only to the end of the reign of George 1., and was com
piled by the Rev. Mark Noble, partly from his own and partly from Granger's collections, did not appear until 1816. It lain three volumes octavo. Grsoger's work certainly contains much curious matter, and has been useful in promoting a taste for British biography; but, as it wee designed rather is an illustration of British portraits, than as an account of British worthies, we find him, as Chalmers observes, " pre serving the memory of many of the most worthless and insignificant of mankind, as well as giving a value to specimens of the art of engraving which are beneath all cont.:is:1FL" So great an impulse was given to the taste for colleetiog portraits by the publication of this work, that in many cases it was pursued with an ardour truly ridi culous, books being unscrupulously mutilated to supply the doomed, and the most preposterous pricks being given for engravings of little Intrinsic value or genuine historical interest. Granger, who published nothing else except a few single sermons and tracts, died on the 14th of April 1776, at the age, it is supposed, of about sixty. An octavo volume, containing extracts from his correspondence with several literary contemporaries relative to his work, and miscellanies and notes of tour, in France, Holland, and Spain, edited by J. P. Malcolm, appeared in 1805.