The New International Encyclopædia/Lounsbury, Thomas Raynesford

LOUNS′BURY, Thomas Raynesford (1838—). An American literary historian and critic, born in Ovid, N. Y., January 1, 1838. Lounsbury graduated at Yale in 1859, and has since received honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard, Lafayette, and Princeton. He was engaged editorially on the New American Cyclopædia from 1860 to 1862, and enlisted then in the 126th New York Volunteers, in which he served to the close of the Civil War. He then taught in New York and studied Early English. In 1870 he became instructor in English in Yale College, and in 1871 professor of English literature in the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, of which school he was also librarian. He continued to investigate the older periods of English, and in this field edited Chaucer's House of Fame and Parlement of Foules, and wrote his most important work, Studies in Chaucer (3 vols., 1891), a monument of scholarly industry, but equally remarkable for literary appreciation and critical acumen. He published in 1879 a History of the English Language, and a life of James Fenimore Cooper in the “American Men of Letters Series” (1883). This is regarded as one of the best of brief biographies. His latest work is a history of Shakespearean criticism entitled Shakespearean Views, of which two volumes, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist and Shakespeare and Voltaire, have appeared.