Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Moore, William (1590-1659)
MOORE, WILLIAM (1590–1659), librarian, was son of William Moore of Gissing, Norfolk, where he was born in 1590. He was sent to the school of Moulton, a few miles from his father's house, and then kept by Mr. Matchet. He was admitted at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, as a scholar 22 June 1606, graduated M.A. in 1613, and on 17 Nov. in that year was admitted a fellow. He spent most of his life within the university, and became well known to all the literary men of his time (H. Bradshaw, The University Library). In 1638 he wrote a poem in the 'Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King' (pp. 10, 11), in which Milton's 'Lycidas' was first printed. His name is spelt More in this publication, as well as in Dd. iv. 36, a manuscript in the Cambridge University Library containing a list of his books, but everywhere else it appears as Moore. The poem, which is signed at the end, begins,
I do not come like one affrighted from
The shades infernal or some troubled tomb,
and consists of forty lines of heroic verse. He was elected university librarian in 1653, and held office till his death in 1659. A small notebook of his containing receipts and a list of medicines with prices, dated 1657, is preserved in the Cambridge University Library. He received from Sir Samuel Morland [q. v.] the fine collection of Waldensian books now in the Cambridge Library, and was an assiduous librarian. In his own college he continued the 'Annales Collegii' begun by Dr. John Caius [q. v.], and bequeathed to it the whole of his own library. In spite of his learning and his benefactions, as Henry Bradshaw remarks, 'his fellowship, his college, and even his degree, are all ignored in the list of librarians in the printed Graduati, where he appears simply as Gul. Moore. In the list of the large collection of manuscripts given to his own college, printed in the Oxford catalogue of 1697, he is misnamed John Moore, while in the modern catalogue of the Caius manuscripts, compiled by one who ought to have known better, his name is most unaccountably passed over altogether in silence' (The University Library).
[J. Venn's Admissions to Gonville and Caius College, 1857; Justa Edwardo King and Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King, Cambridge, 1638; Collected Papers of Henry Bradshaw, Cambridge, 1889; Catalogue of the Manuscripts preserved in the Library of the University of Cambridge, 1856, i. 237, 316.]