Shakespearean scholar; born at Leicester, England, in 1735. He was educated in the free grammar school of his native town and at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; became a classical tutor in the latter institution in 1760, and a master in 1775, and was appointed librarian at the university in 1778. He held various benefices at Lichfield, Canterbury, and St. Paul’s, but he twice declined the offer of a bishopric, unwilling to give up the free-and-easy life he was used to. The only monument of his learning and industry he has left is his “Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare,” published in 1766, and afterward often reprinted. Died at Cambridge, Sept. 8, 1797.

Personal

  When a young man he wrote some “Directions for Studying the English History,” which have been printed in the “European Magazine” for 1791 and in Seward’s “Biographiana;” but his only work of any importance is the “Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare.” Invincible indolence prevented him from achieving other literary triumphs. He was content to be the hero of a coterie, and to reign supreme in a college combination-room amid the delights of the pipe and the bottle. To his ease or his disappointment in love may be attributed a want of attention to his personal appearance, and to the usual forms of behaviour belonging to his station. In the company of strangers the eccentricity of his appearance caused him sometimes to be taken for a person half crazed. There were three things, it is said, which he loved above all others, namely, old port, old clothes, and old books; and three things which nobody could persuade him to do, namely, to rise in the morning, to go to bed at night, and to settle an account. In his own college he was adored, and in the university he exercised for many years more influence than any other individual.

General

  It (“the Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare”) may in truth be pointed out as a master-piece, whether considered with a view to the sprightliness and vivacity with which it is written, the clearness of the arrangement, the force and variety of the evidence, or the compression of scattered materials into a narrow compass; materials which inferior writers would have expanded into a large volume.

  How shall I talk of thee, and of thy wonderful collection, O RARE RICHARD FARMER?—and of thy scholarship, acuteness, pleasantry, singularities, varied learning, and colloquial powers! Thy name will live long among scholars in general; and in the bosoms of virtuous and learned bibliomaniacs thy memory shall be ever shrined! The walls of Emanuel College now cease to convey the sounds of thy festive wit; thy volumes are no longer seen, like Richard Smith’s “bundles of sticht books,” strewn upon the floor; and thou hast ceased, in the cause of thy beloved Shakspeare, to delve into the fruitful ore of black-letter literature. Peace to thy honest spirit; for thou wert wise without vanity, learned without pedantry, and joyous without vulgarity…. Farmer had his foragers, his jackals, and his avant-couriers, for it was well known how dearly he loved every thing that was interesting and rare in the literature of former ages. As he walked the streets of London—careless of his dress, and whether his wig was full-bottomed or narrow-bottomed—he would talk and “mutter strange speeches” to himself, thinking all the time, I ween, of some curious discovery he had recently made in the aforesaid precious black-letter tomes. But the reader is impatient for the BIBLIOTHECA FARMERIANA.

  His knowledge is various, extensive and recondite. With much seeming negligence, and perhaps in later years some real relaxation, he understands more and remembers more about common and uncommon subjects of literature, than many of those who would be thought to read all the day and meditate half the night. In quickness of apprehension and acuteness of discrimination I have not often seen his equal.

  Farmer had silently pursued an entire chase in this “black” forest, for he had a keen gusto for the native venison; and, alluding to his Shakespearian pursuits, exclaimed in the inspiring language of his poet,—

	“Age cannot wither them, nor custom stale
	Their infinite variety.”

His vivacity relieved the drowsiness of mere antiquarianism. This novel pursuit once opened, an eager and motley pack was halloed up; but Shakespeare, like Actæon, was torn to pieces by a whole kennel of his own hounds, as they were typified with equal humor and severity. But to be severe, and never to be just, is the penury of the most sordid criticism; and among these—

“Spirits black, white, and gray,”—

are some of the most illustrious in English literature.

  There was another cause of the hospitality of Steevens and his school of commentators. FARMER was their Coriphæus. Their souls were prostrate before the extent of his researches in that species of literature which possesses this singular advantage for the cultivator, that, if he studies it in original edition, of which only one or two copies are known to exist (the merit is gone if there is a baker’s dozen known), he is immediately pronounced learned, judicious, laborious, acute. And this was Farmer’s praise. He wrote, “An Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare,” which has not one passage of solid criticism from the first page to the last, and from which, if the name and the works of Shakspere were to perish, and one copy—an unique copy is the affectionate name for these things—could be miraculously preserved, the only inference from the book would be that William Shakspere was a very obscure and ignorant man, whom some misjudging admirers had been desirous to exalt into an ephemeral reputation, and that Richard Farmer was a very distinguished and learned man, who had stripped the mask off the pretender. The first edition of Farmer’s pamphlet appeared in 1767…. This arrogant pamphlet.