JOHN OXLEE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 May 1941, Page 3

JOHN OXLEE

MASTER OF LANGUAGES. John Oxlee was born in 1779. The son of a well-to-do Yorkshire farmer, he came into the world at Guisborough, a town in north Yorkshire, and was educated at Sunderland. Leaving school, he devoted himself to business for a short time, but he was drawn more and more to the study of languages, and made such astonishing progress in Latin that he was appointed second master at Tunbridge grammar school. He studied so hard that when still a young man he lost the use of one eye. but this one-eyed scholar added Hebrew and Chaldee and Syriac to his list of languages. He became a curate near Whitby in Yorkshire, then rector of Scawton, and then rector of Molesworth in Huntingdonshire. He was free. then, to devote almost all his time to his favourite study. He mastered language after language. He became steeped in grammar. He was conversant with no less than 120 languages and dialects, and often he gave himself up to such little-known languages that he had to compile his own grammars. Nothing could stop him in his conquest of 'languages—a second Alexander without a sword. He studied the Talmud, and wrote an erudite book (in three volumes.) on the doctrine of the Trinity, an amazing work which no one thinks of reading now’. He published many books besides, and left unpublished an Armenian and Arabic lexicon. Blessed with the gift of tongues, he became silent for ever in 1854.