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John Campbell Shairp

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JOHN CAMPBELL SHAIRP (1819-1885), Scottish critic and man of letters, was born at Houstoun House, Linlithgowshire, on the 30th of July 1819. He was the third son of Major Norman Shairp of Houstoun, and was educated at Edinburgh Academy and Glasgow University. He gained the Snell exhibition, and entered at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1840. In 1842 he gained the Newdigate prize for a poem on Charles XII., and took his degree in 1844. During these years the "Oxford movement" was at its height. Shairp was stirred by Newman's sermons, and he had a great admiration for the poetry of Keble, on whose character and work he wrote an enthusiastic essay; but he remained faithful to his Presbyterian upbringing. After leaving Oxford he took a mastership at Rugby under Tait. In 1857 he became assistant to the professor of humanity in the university of St Andrews, and in 1861 he was appointed to that chair. In 1864 he published Kilmahoe, a Highland Pastoral, and in 1868 he republished some articles under the name of Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. In 1868 he was presented to the principalship of the United College, St Andrews, and lectured from time to time on literary and ethical subjects. A course of the lectures was published in 1870 as Culture and Religion. In 1873 Principal Shairp helped to edit the life of his predecessor J. D. Forbes, and in 1874 he edited Dorothy Wordsworth's charming Recollections of a Tour in Scotland. In 1877 he was elected professor of poetry at Oxford in succession to Sir F. H. Doyle. Of his lectures from this chair the best were published in 1881 as Aspects of Poetry. In 1877 he had published The Poetic Interpretation of Nature, in which he enters fully into the "old quarrel," as Plato called it, between science and poetry, and traces with great clearness the ideas of nature in all the chief Hebrew, classical and English poets. In 187 9 he contributed a life of Robert Burns to the "English Men of Letters" series. He was re-elected to the chair of poetry in 1882, and discharged his duties there and at St Andrews till the end of 1884. He died at Ormsary, Argyllshire, on the 18th of September 1885. In 1888 appeared Glen Desseray, and other Poems, edited by F. T. Palgrave.

See W. A. Knight's Principal Shairp and his Friends (1888).