Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Myers, Ernest James
MYERS, ERNEST JAMES (1844–1921), poet and translator, was born at Keswick 13 October 1844, the second son of the Rev. Frederic Myers [q.v.], perpetual curate of St. John's, Keswick, and younger brother of Frederic William Henry Myers [q.v.]. His mother was Susan Harriet, youngest daughter of John Marshall, of Hallsteads, on Ullswater; and, spending there his summer holidays during many years, Myers retained throughout his life an ardent love of the fell-country. From Cheltenham, where he was head of the school, he went in 1863 as an exhibitioner to Balliol College, Oxford. He enjoyed college life to the full, rowed in the college eight, played rackets and tennis, gained a first class in classical moderations (1865) and the Gaisford prize for Greek verse (1865), but narrowly missed the Hertford scholarship and a first class in literae humaniores. In 1868 he was elected fellow of Wadham College, where he remained for three years as a lecturer; and here also he wrote and published his first poem, The Puritans (1869), a short drama intentionally reminiscent of the Persae of Aeschylus.
From 1871 to 1891 Myers lived in London, where he was called to the bar (1874) but never practised. During these years he published his prose translations of Pindar's Odes (1874) and of the last eight books of the Iliad (with Andrew Lang and Walter Leaf, 1882); some essays in magazines, and one, on Aeschylus, in the collection entitled Hellenica, edited by Evelyn Abbott (1880); an introduction to his selection of prose passages by Milton (‘Parchment series’, 1884); a short biography of Viscount Althorp (1890), whose services in connexion with the Reform Act of 1832 he thought to be insufficiently recognized; and three volumes of verse, Poems (1877), The Defence of Rome (1880), and The Judgement of Prometheus (1886), the last two containing also ‘other poems’.
Myers's activities, however, during his life in London were not confined to literature. From 1876 for nearly six years he acted as secretary to the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching. He was on the council of the Hellenic Society from its foundation in 1879. Later, after abandoning the idea of parliamentary life, he worked for the Charity Organization Society, serving on its central administrative committee until he left London.In 1883 Myers had married Nora Margaret, daughter of the Rev. Samuel Lodge, rector of Scrivelsby, Lincolnshire; they had two sons and three daughters. In 1891 the family moved to a house at Chislehurst on the edge of Paul's Cray Common [see A Common in Gathered Poems]. Here Myers remained for the rest of his life, abandoning the habit of continental travel to which some of his best poems bear witness, but paying a weekly visit to London in order to see friends and to attend the council meetings of the Society for the Protection of Women and Children. Most of the verse composed in these years is included in Gathered Poems (1904), a collection containing also what he thought best in the volumes previously published. He died at Fontridge, Etchingham, Sussex, 25 November 1921. He was survived by his wife, one son, and two daughters; one daughter had died in infancy, and his elder son was killed while serving in France in 1918.
The most obvious characteristic of Myers's writings is his enthusiasm for Greece. His essay on Aeschylus gained much more attention than his biography of Lord Althorp. The excellence in scholarship, diction, and rhythm of his prose translations of Homer and Pindar is generally recognized. The volume of Gathered Poems opens with a group entitled Hellenica; and the next group, Loca Carmine Digna, celebrates first Arcadia, Ithome, and a tomb in Athens. In a sonnet addressed to Pindar he describes Hellas as the ‘first fruit and best of all the western world’, and declares that ‘Whate'er we hold of beauty, half is hers’. The poems on Greek subjects illustrate also a second obvious trait, his enthusiasm for the heroic. The ‘crown of Being,’ he writes, ‘fairer far than stream, or sky, or star,’ is a ‘heroic soul’ [Gathered Poems, p. 124]. And this enthusiasm is not less marked in the poems which celebrate men of later times, for instance, King Alfred, Milton [see the drama so entitled and Gathered Poems, p. 120], Mazzini and Garibaldi [see The Defence of Rome], and General Gordon.
[Private information; personal knowledge.]