William Mitford - Historian of Ancient Greece

Historian of Ancient Greece

He married Miss Fanny Molloy in 1766, the daughter of James Molloy of Dublin. He retired to Exbury for the rest of his life, and made the study of the Greek language his hobby and occupation. After ten years his wife died, and in October 1776 Mitford went abroad. He was encouraged by French scholars whom he met in Paris, Avignon and Nice to give himself systematically to the study of Greek history. But it was Edward Gibbon, with whom he was closely associated when they both were officers in the South Hampshire Militia, who suggested to Mitford the form which his work should take. In 1784 the first of the volumes of his History of Greece appeared, and the fifth and last of these quartos was published in 1810, after which the state of Mitford's eyesight and other physical infirmities, including a loss of memory, forbade his continuation of the enterprise, although he painfully revised successive new editions.