1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Routh, Martin Joseph

ROUTH, MARTIN JOSEPH (1755–1854), English classical scholar, was born at South Elmham, Suffolk, on the 18th of September 1755. He was educated at Queen’s College, Oxford, and subsequently elected to a fellowship at Magdalen, of which society he became president in 1791. He died at Oxford on the 22nd of December 1854, and retained his physical and intellectual powers to the last. He was the author of editions of the Euthydemus and Gorgias of Plato (1784), to which Dindorf declared himself indebted for his first ideas of Greek criticism, and of Bishop Burnet’s History of his Own Time (2nd ed., 1833) and History of the Reign of King James the Second (1852). Routh was also an authority on patriotic literature, his Reliquiae Sacrae (2nd ed., 1846–48), a collection of the fragments of the Fathers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum opuscula praecipua quaedam (2nd ed., 1840) being valuable contributions to ecclesiastical knowledge.

See Gentleman’s Magazine, 1855; J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men (1888).