On 1 Nov. 1862 he married the Hon. Edythe Fitzpatrick, daughter of the first Baron Castletown, and in 1866 received the rank of K.C.B., having been a companion of the Bath since 1848, and was appointed minister at Copenhagen. The climate of Denmark proving too severe for Lady Murray, Sir Charles applied for and obtained the British legation at Lisbon, which he kept till his final retirement from the service in 1874. He was sworn of the privy council on 13 May 1875.
Murray's remaining years were spent in cultivated leisure. A charming manner, an immense and varied store of reminiscences, united to a handsome and striking appearance, rendered him a very well-known figure in society; but the associates he liked best were literary men, with whom he maintained constant intercourse, personal and epistolary. An excellent linguist, he devoted much study to oriental languages and philology, upon which, and upon theology, he left a quantity of notes and fragmentary treatises.
Sir Charles Murray resided during his later years at the Grange, Old Windsor, spending the winter months in the south of France. He died in Paris on 3 June 1895. There is a portrait of Murray by Willis Maddox at the Grange, Old Windsor. His intellectual gifts and singular versatility were such as might have raised him to greater eminence than he attained; no doubt they would have done so had less affluent circumstances compelled him to concentrate his energy upon a single object.
He published the following works:
- 'Travels in North America,' 2 vols. 1839; 2nd ed. 1843; 3rd ed. 1854.
- 'The Prairie Bird,' 1844, and many subsequent editions.
- 'Hassan; or, the Child of the Pyramid,' 1857.
- 'Nour-ed-dyn; or, the Light of the Faith,' 1883.
- 'A Short Memoir of Mohammed Ali,' 1898 (posthumous).
[Sir Charles Murray's MSS.; private information; Life by Sir Herbert Maxwell, 1898.]
MYERS, FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY (1843–1901), poet and essayist, was born on 6 Feb. 1843 at Keswick in Cumberland. His father was the Rev. Frederic Myers [q. v.], perpetual curate of St. John's, Keswick, and his mother was Susan Harriet, youngest daughter of John Marshall of Hallsteads (a beautifully situated house on the left bank of Ulleswater), who was M.P. in 1832 for the undivided county of Yorkshire. Mrs. Myers was her husband's second wife, married in 1842; and Frederic was the eldest of their three sons. When he was seven years old his father's health failed; and on the death of the latter in 1851 the family moved to Blackheath, where the eldest boy for three years attended a preparatory day school, under the Rev. R. Cowley Powles, a well-known teacher. In 1856 Mrs. Myers took a house at Cheltenham; and in August of the same year Frederic, aged 13, was entered at Cheltenham College, then in the fifteenth year of its existence, under its second principal, the Rev. W. Dobson. His taste for poetry was unmistakable from the first. He has himself recorded the delight which the study of Homer, Æschylus, and Lucretius brought him from the age of fourteen to sixteen, and the 'intoxicating joy' which attended the discovery of Sappho's fragments in an old school book at the age of seventeen. His enthusiasm for Pindar, which also dates from his school days, is well remembered by his college friends in their eager undergraduate discussions; and it may well be doubted if there ever lived another English boy who had learned for his pleasure the whole of Vergil by heart before he had passed the school age.
His great ability and particularly his poetic powers were recognised at once by schoolfellows and teachers alike. He had a very distinguished career at Cheltenham College; he won the senior classical scholarship in his first year; in 1858, besides gaining the prize for Latin lyrics, he sent in two English poems, in different metres, which were both successful; in 1859 he entered for the national 'Robert Burns Centenary' competition with a poem which was placed second in the judges' award. In October 1859 he left the school, and passed a year of private study, part of the time with Mr. Dobson, who had in the summer resigned the head-mastership. But though Myers had left, he was qualified to compete again for the college prize for English verse, which he won in 1860 with a remarkable poem on the 'Death of Socrates.' In the same year he was elected the first minor scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and went into residence in October. At the university few men have won more honours. The record is as follows: a college scholarship and declamation prize; two university scholarships (the Bell and the Craven); no less than six university prizes (the English poem twice, the Latin poem, the Latin essay three times); second classic in the spring of 1864; second in the first class of the Moral Sciences Tripos in December of the same year, and fellow of Trinity in 1865.
