Richard Mant

Richard Mant (February 12, 1776 – 1848) was an English churchman who became a bishop in Ireland. He was a prolific writer, his major work being a History of the Church of Ireland.^[1]

Life

He was born at Southampton, where his father Richard Mant D.D. was headmaster of the King Edward VI School. He was educated at Winchester College and at Trinity College, Oxford which he entered in 1793. He graduated B.A. in 1797, and became a Fellow of Oriel College in 1798, a position he held to 1804.^[1]

Mant was ordained in the Church of England, holding a curacy at Southampton in 1802. He was appointed to the vicarage of Coggeshall, Essex in 1810 and in 1811 he became Bampton Lecturer. In 1816 he was made rector of St Botolph's, Bishopsgate, and in 1820 became Bishop of Killaloe and Kilfenora, in Ireland. In 1823 he was translated to Down and Connor, and from 1842 was the Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore when the two dioceses united.^[1]

Works

In 1808 Mant published The Simpliciad, a satirical poem that parodied Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) by William Wordsworth. He gave notes relating his parodies to the originals.^[2] The aim of the work included the other Lake Poets, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, with To a Young Ass by Coleridge used to guy the group as a whole.^[3]

Mant's Ancient Hymns from the Roman Breviary^[4] (1837) was one of the earliest collections of translated Latin hymnody in English. He belonged to a group of revivalist translators of Latin hymns, with John Chandler (1806–1876) and Isaac Williams. John Ellerton commented on his good taste, but also discerned a lack of understanding of the group of hymns he was handling.^[5] The Psalms in an English Metrical Version^[6] (1824) were influenced by Robert Lowth's theories of biblical poetry, the psalms becoming "stiff and stately odes" according to John Julian.^[7]

Other works included:

• A biblical commentary written withGeorge D'Oyly
• History of the Church of Ireland (1839–1841; 2 vols.).
• An Appeal to the Gospel (1812), Bampton Lectures.

Family

Mant married Elizabeth Wood (died 2 April 1846), of a Sussex family, on 22 December 1804, Their children were Walter Bishop Mant, another son, and a daughter.^[1]

References

• The Simpliciad: 1808 (Revolution and Romanticism, 1789–1834) Publisher: Woodstock Books Inc. ISBN 1-85477-076-4

Notes

1. s:Mant, Richard (DNB00)
2. Brian R Bates (22 July 2015). Wordsworth's Poetic Collections, Supplementary Writing and Parodic Reception. Routledge. p. 18. ISBN 978-1-317-32227-6.
3. Richard Gravil (2009). Grasmere, 2009: Selected Papers from the Wordsworth Summer Conference. Humanities-Ebooks. p. 148. ISBN 978-1-84760-110-0.
4. Ancient Hymns from the Roman Breviary
5. John Julian (1907). A Dictionary of Hymnology 1. John Murray. p. 713.
6. Psalms in an English Metrical Version
7. John Julian (1907). A Dictionary of Hymnology 2. John Murray. p. 921.

External links

• Bibliographic directory from Project Canterbury

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.