Hugh Chisholm

“ His official career at the British Museum marked an epoch in the management of the library, in the history of which his place is second only to that of Panizzi. Besides introducing the “sliding press” in 1887 he was responsible for reviving the publication of the general catalogue, the printing of which, interrupted in 1841, was resumed under him in 1880, and gradually completed. The antipodes of a Dryasdust, his human interest in books made him an ideal librarian, and his courtesy and helpfulness were outstanding features in a personality of singular charm. ”

“ His father was really the pioneer of modern philological research in England; his articles in the Quarterly Review (1835, 1836) on English lexicography and dialects, and on the Celtic question, and his essays in the Transactions of the Philological Society (reprinted 1859) , were invaluable to the later study of the English language. The son, who thus owed much to his parentage, was educated at home and at a private school, and in 1851, just after his father’s death, entered the British Museum as an assistant in the library. ”

“ The whole bookish world looked on him as a friend. Among his “hobbies” was a study of astrology, to which, without associating his name with it in public, he devoted prolonged inquiry. Under the pseudonym of “A. G. Trent” he published in 1880 an article (in the University Magazine) on “The Soul and the Stars”—quoted in Wilde and Dodson’s Natal Astrology. ”