Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement/Grosart, Alexander Balloch
GROSART, ALEXANDER BALLOCH (1827–1899), author and editor, was born on 18 June 1827 at Stirling, where his father, William Grosart, was a builder and contractor. His mother was Mary Balloch. He was educated at the parish school of Falkirk and privately. At the age of twenty-one (November 1848) he entered the university of Edinburgh with the view of preparing for the ministry. Already he had acquired a taste for literary and antiquarian studies, and, although he failed to take any degree, his studies lay in the direction of the special work to which in after life his energies were devoted. While still a student he published an edition of the poems of Robert Ferguson (1851). He entered the theological hall of the United Presbyterian Church in 1851, and after the usual curriculum was licensed by the presbytery of Edinburgh in January 1856. Having received a call from the first congregation of Kinross, on the shores of Loch Leven, he was ordained there on 29 Oct. following. The church was large and influential. He soon won a reputation as a preacher, and at the same time became well known as an author of religious manuals and a literary antiquary. In January 1862 he declined a call to Woolwich, but early in 1865 accepted one from the newly formed congregation of Princes Park, Liverpool. On 4 March 1868 he was translated to Mount Street Presbyterian church, Blackburn. Shortly after his induction he removed with the majority of the congregation to a new church in Preston New Road, called St. George's church. The membership of this church was nearly tripled during Grosart's ministry. The building, which had cost 8,000l. as an initial outlay, was freed from debt, and a new church was started in the Whalley Range district of Blackburn in 1884. Notwithstanding his literary occupations, Grosart was diligent and sympathetic in the performance of his pastoral duties. Failing health compelled him to resign his charge at Blackburn in November 1892. He retired to Dublin, where he died on 16 March 1899, and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery. While in Liverpool he married Miss McDowall, daughter of a builder and contractor of Dublin.
Grosart's claim to remembrance rests on his reprints of rare Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, but it was his strong interest in puritan theology that originally led him to devote himself to the study of sixteenth and seventeenth century poets and prose writers. The writers, whose works he first edited, were the puritan divines Richard Sibbes (1862–4) and Thomas Brooks (1866–7), together with Herbert Palmer's 'Memorials of Godliness' (1865), Michael Bruce's 'Poems,' with memoir (1865), and Richard Gilpin's 'Demonologia Sacra' (1867). A bibliography of Richard Baxter's writings followed in 1868. He had then already foreshadowed the special bent of his future labours in two pamphlets, 'Lord Bacon not the Author of the Christian Paradoxes' (1865) and 'Who wrote Britain's Ida?' (1869), a poem previously assigned in error to Edmund Spenser, and ascribed by Grosart to Phineas Fletcher. After 1868 he concentrated his energies on the reissue, by private subscription, of secular literature. Between 1868 and 1876 he printed privately for subscribers a series of thirty-nine volumes, which he entitled the Fuller Worthies library. The series included Thomas Fuller's 'Poems and Translations in Verse,' the works in prose and verse of Sir John Davies (3 vols.), Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (4 vols.), Henry Vaughan (4 vols.), Andrew Marvell (4 vols.), and George Herbert (3 vols.), besides the poems of Richard Crashaw, John Donne, Robert Southwell, Sir Philip Sidney, and others. The series was completed by four volumes of miscellanies, containing the poems of many less known authors, whose published work was small in quantity and quite inaccessible.
Before the Fuller Worthies Library was completed Grosart began another series of reprints, in 1875, under the title of 'Occasional Issues of Unique and very Rare Books.' All the volumes of the 'Occasional Issues,' which numbered thirty-eight, the last appearing in 1881, are of the highest bibliographical interest; they include Robert Dover's 'Annalia Dubrensia,' Robert Chester's 'Love's Martyr' (an edition of which he provided for the New Shakspere Society), 'Willobie his Avisa,' and Clerke's 'Polimanteia.'
A third series of reprints, 'The Chertsey Worthies Library' (1876-81), was in fourteen volumes, and supplied reprints of the complete works of Nicholas Breton, John Davies of Hereford, Joshua Sylvester, Francis Quarles, Dr. Joseph Beaumont, Dr. Henry More, and Abraham Cowley. A fourth series of equal interest was projected in 1881, under the title of the 'Huth Library,' after the name of the great book collector, Henry Huth [q. v.], in whose library original copies of the volumes which it was Grosart's intention to reprint were to be found. The Huth Library came to a close in 1886 after the issue of the works of Robert Greene in fifteen volumes, Thomas Nashe in six volumes, Gabriel Harvey in three volumes, and Thomas Dekker's prose tracts in five volumes. Promised reprints of the prose works of Sir Philip Sidney, with the works of George Whetstone, Henry Chettle, Anthony Munday, and many smaller writers, were abandoned. Meanwhile Grosart embarked in two other ventures of interest, editions of the complete works of Samuel Daniel and of Edmund Spenser. The edition of Spenser reached ten volumes (published between 1880 and 1888), and included a memoir by Grosart and critical essays by Professor Dowden, Professor Palgrave, and other well-known writers. The edition of the works of Daniel reached five volumes, the last two appearing as late as 1896.
In addition to these undertakings, Grosart was responsible for the printing for the first time from the original manuscripts of the Towneley Hall MSS. 1897 (2 vols.), Sir John Eliot's 'Works,' 1879-82 (6 vols.), and the 'Lismore Papers' of Sir Richard Boyle, first earl of Cork, 1886-8 (5 vols.) For the Chetham Society he edited the Farmer MSS. in the 'Chetham Library,' 1873; for the Roxburghe Club the complete poems of Richard Barnfield, 1876; and for the Camden Society 'The Voyage to Cadiz of 1625' in 1883. He also issued a complete collection of the prose works of Wordsworth, 1876, 3 vols. A supplement to his edition of the 'Works of Crashaw,' consisted of hitherto unprinted poems which he discovered in manuscript in the library of Trinity College, Dublin (1888), and he prepared some small volumes of selections from the works of Sidney, Ralegh, and others in a series which he called the 'Elizabethan Library' (1896-1899). A projected life of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, was never written.
All Grosart's editions of old authors were privately issued in very limited editions to subscribers at high prices, and the business arrangements were conducted by himself. His handwriting was peculiarly small and often illegible. He spared neither time nor trouble in searching for rare volumes and recondite information, and in the course of his career travelled widely, ransacking the chief libraries of France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, as well as those of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His literary style was defaced by mannerisms and affectations; he was, as Dr. John Brown (author of 'Rab and his Friends') used to say, 'by nature quaint and archaic;' in the prefaces and notes to some of his later reprints his querulousness, dogmatism, and ill-temper were painfully conspicuous. All his literary work was marred by egotism, a want of taste, diffuseness, and clumsy arrangement of his materials. Yet by means of his elaborate series of reprints of Tudor and Jacobean writers, whose works were rare and almost inaccessible, he conspicuously advanced the thorough study of English literature.
Grosart never abandoned the writing of devotional books of religion. His early religious publications include 'Small Sins' and 'Mighty to Save,' 1863; 'The Lambs all Safe' and 'The Prince of Light,' 1864; and 'Joining the Church,' 1865. 'Representative Nonconformists, with the Message of their Lifework for To-day,' appeared in 1879. In 1868 he printed for private circulation a small volume of fifteen hymns, and he afterwards printed many new year and watch-night hymns. His poems and hymns were collected in 'Songs of the Day and Night, or Three Centuries of Original Hymns' (1890).
Grosart was also a voluminous contributor to literary and theological periodicals. He wrote many articles for the 'Encyclopædia Britannica' (9th edit.), and was a frequent contributor to 'The Leisure Hour,' 'Sunday at Home,' and 'United Presbyterian Magazine.' In August 1877 the university of Edinburgh conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D. The university of St. Andrews gave him the degree of D.D. He was also a fellow of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries. His library had few exemplars in first-rate condition, but it was large and well selected, and valuable from the completeness of its puritan literature. Many of the volumes were acquired after his death by the Princeton University of the United States and by the British Museum.
[Notice by Miss Toulmin Smith in Jahrbuch der deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft, Berlin, 1900; Prospectus of the Huth Library, 1881; Julian's Dictionary of Hymnology; personal knowledge.]