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ALLINGHAM
ALLSOP

practised and lectured at Edinburgh until 1801, when he accompanied Lord Holland and his family to Spain, remaining four years there with them. For the remainder of his life lie was one of the wits and most familiar habitués of Holland House, London. He was known as "Lady Holland's Atheist," and was "a complete sceptic," doubting if Christ had ever existed (Greville's Memoirs, v, 157). He contributed to the Edinburgh Review, and he wrote a standard Inquiry into the Rise and Growth of the Royal Prerogative in England (1830). From 1811 to 1820 he was Warden, and from 1820 to 1843 Master, of Dulwich College. D. Apr. 10, 1843.

Allingham, William, Irish poet. B. Mar. 19, 1824. Ed. private schools in Ireland. At the age of fourteen he entered his father's bank, and in 1846 passed to the Irish Civil Service. His Poems (1850) and Day and Night Songs (1854) won him the friendship of Leigh Hunt, Rossetti, Tennyson, and other distinguished poets, and in 1863 he transferred to the English Customs. In 1865 he issued his chief volume of verse, Fifty Modern Poems. In 1870 he retired from the Civil Service and became sub-editor of Fraser's Magazine. He succeeded Froude as editor in 1874. His Diary (1907) is particularly interesting as a record of conversations (especially with Tennyson and Rossetti) which often turned on religion. He represents both himself and Tennyson as completely sceptical. "The secret [of man's condition and destiny] is kept from one and all of us," he says (p. 149); and he is disappointed "to find a great poet [Tennyson] with no better grounds of comfort than a common person " (p. 317). "I will have nothing to do with …… any form of Christianity," he says elsewhere; and, though he professed Theism, he maintained that " we cannot in the least describe, or comprehend, or even think Deity." He had, at his request, a secular funeral service, a friend reading his fine words:—

Body to purifying flame,
Soul to the Great Deep whence it came,
Leaving a song on earth below,
An urn of ashes white as snow.

D. Nov. 18, 1889.

Allman, Professor George Johnston, LL.D., D.Sc., F.R.S., Irish mathematician. B. Sep. 28, 1824. Ed. Trinity College, Dublin, where he was senior moderator and gold medallist in mathematics, and Bishop Law's mathematical prize-man. He graduated in law in 1854, but he preferred mathematics, and was professor at Queen's College, Galway, from 1853 to 1893. He was also a member of the Senate of Queen's University and the Royal University of Ireland. Professor Allman was as an earnest and high-minded Positivist, but his academic position in an Irish college prevented him from taking open part in the movement (Positivist Review, July, 1904). D. May 9, 1904.

Allsop, Thomas, reformer. B. Apr. 10, 1795. Ed. Wirksworth Grammar School. Allsop was a business man of literary tastes who in 1818 became a friend of Coleridge. He is known as Coleridge's "favourite disciple," but it was the radical opinions of the poet's youth which he shared. See his Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge (1836). He had a passion for reform and enlightenment, and was much esteemed by Robert Owen, Mazzini, and Holyoake. In advertising for a country house he said that preference would be given to one which had no church or clergyman within five miles (Dict. Nat. Biog.). With Holyoake he attended Owen's funeral, and, when he learned that they were compelled to have the Church service, he complained bitterly of this "mummery of an outworn creed" over the remains of a man who had spent a life in freeing his fellows from "the degradation of superstition" (Holyoake's Life and Last Days of R. Owen, p. 17). D. Apr. 12, 1880.

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