DANES, RICHARD, was born st Marketetosworth in the year 1708. His first teacher was Anthony Blackwell, the well-knoivn author of ' The Sacred Classics,' after which he spent some time at the Charter House, and went to Emanuel College, Cambridge, in the year 1725 ; he was elected Fellow in 1731. In 1736 he published a speci men of a translation of 'Paradise Lost' into Greek hexametera, which proved, as he afterwards admitted (Pref. to his Misoellanea Critics'), that ho was then very insufficiently acquainted with the Greek language. He became master of the grammar-school at Newcastle upon-Tyne in 1738 ; hut his disagreeable manners diminished the number of his scholars, and he resigned the situation in 1749. In his latter days his principal employment was rowing in a boat on the Tyne. He died at Haworth on the 21st of March 1766. The work on which his fame rests is his Miscellanea Critics,' published at Cambridge in 1745, which places him in the same class with Bentley and Person as a verbal Greek critic. Tho work is divided into five sections, of which the first contains some emendations of .Terentianus Maurus ; the second is a specimen of the want of accuracy in the Oxford edition of Pinder ; in the third are some general observations on the Greek language, to which are added some emendations of Callimachns; the fourth is a short discussion on the Digamma ; and the fifth is devoted to the illustration of Aristophanes. Tho leading
characteristic of the scholarship of Dawes is a proneness to rash generalisation ; and though it has been termed the scholarship of observation, it must be admitted that Dawes is too apt to form general rules from an insufficient number of passages, and conse quently that his system scarcely deserves that title. Hardly one of the syntactical rules which Dawes has laid down has been admitted as unexceptionable; and some of them have been completely over thrown by the number of passages in which they are violated. The authority of the bliscellanen Critics' was however so great for some twenty or thirty years after its publication, that many readings sup ported by manuscript authority were altered to meet the canons in that book. The violent animosity which Dawes everywhere shows towards Bentley may perhaps be accounted for by the universal dialike which that great scholar had incurred during his quarrels with Trinity College, about the time when Dawes was a young member of the university. The best editions of the ` Miscellanea Critics' (which may now be considered as superseded by the advances which Greek scholarship has made during the last thirty years) are those by Burgess, Oxon., 1781, and by Kidd, Cantabr., 1817, in which specimens of his other writings may be seen.