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George Burges

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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GEORGE BURGES (1786-1864), English classical scholar, was born in India. He was educated at Charterhouse school and Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his degree in 1807, and obtaining one of the members' prizes both in 1808 and 1809. He stayed up at Cambridge and became a most successful "coach." He had a great reputation as a Greek scholar, and was a somewhat acrimonious critic of rival scholars, especially Bishop Blomfield. Subsequently he fell into embarrassed circumstances through injudicious speculation, and in 1841 a civil list pension of loo per annum was bestowed upon him. He died at Ramsgate, on the 11th of January 1864. Burges was a man of great learning and industry, but too fond of introducing arbitrary emendations into the text of classical authors. His chief works are: Euripides' Troades (1807) and Phoenissae (1809); Aeschylus' Supplices (1821), Eumenides (1822) and Prometheus (1831); Sophocles' Philoctetes (1833); E. F. Poppo's Prolegomena to Thucydides (1837), an abridged translation with critical remarks; Hermesianactis Fragmenta (1839). He also edited some of the dialogues of Plato with English notes, and translated nearly the whole of that author and the Greek anthology for Bohn's Classical library. He was a frequent contributor to the Classical Journal and other periodicals, and dedicated to Byron a play called The Son of Erin, or, The Cause of the Greeks (1823).