age his studious bent singled him out from his fellows. ‘James Murray’, they said, ‘will never make a farmer; he has always a book in his pocket.’ At the age of seventeen he became assistant master at Hawick grammar school and at the age of twenty head master of the Subscription Academy in the same town. This period of his life was marked by great activity in the acquirement of languages, in the pursuit of various branches of natural science, and in the study of local antiquities; to his interest in these subjects many articles in the Proceedings of the Hawick Archaeological Society bear witness. During the tenure of the head mastership he married, in 1862, Maggie Isabella Sarah Scott, of Belfast. Owing to the state of his wife's health, which required a change of climate, he migrated south and took a situation in the London office of the Chartered Bank of India. In 1864 his wife died after the death of their child, and in 1867 he married Ada Agnes, eldest daughter of George Ruthven, of Kendal, by whom he had six sons and five daughters. Three years later, after the reopening of Mill Hill School under Richard Francis Weymouth [q.v.], he joined the staff as a master. He graduated B.A. of London University in 1873. He remained at Mill Hill School until 1885, when he removed to Oxford in order to devote himself exclusively to the editing of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, of which he had been appointed editor in 1879 and which he had hitherto carried on in conjunction with his teaching.
Murray's appointment as editor was the outcome of proposals, editorial plans, and negotiations which took their first rise from the suggestion made in 1857 by Richard Chenevix Trench [q.v.], afterwards archbishop of Dublin, that the London Philological Society should prepare a supplement to existing dictionaries of the English language. This suggestion had resulted in the adoption of a scheme for the compilation of a comprehensive historical dictionary. In 1861, at the very time that Murray, in consequence of his philological interests and of his residence in and near London, became associated with the Society and its leaders—Alexander John Ellis, Frederick James Furnivall, Richard Morris, Walter William Skeat, Henry Sweet—the enterprise was threatened with extinction through the death of the editor designate, Herbert Coleridge [q.v.]. That scholar had devoted himself to collecting and arranging the material which voluntary workers enlisted by the Society had amassed. It was largely due to Murray's activity that the project was revived. Having been approached by publishers who desired to bring out a rival to Webster's dictionary, he had prepared a specimen. This was shown to members of the Philological Society and received with approval; but no publisher could be induced to undertake the risk involved in Murray's scheme, until in 1878 contact was established with the delegates of the Clarendon Press at Oxford. In March 1879 an agreement was entered into by which Murray, with the help of a staff, undertook to produce a dictionary of the English language extending to 6,000–7,000 pages. It had been agreed in previous discussion that the work should be completed in ten years. Thereafter Murray's philological interests were focussed on this great task; and in the ‘Scriptorium’ built at Mill Hill—which served as a model for the corrugated-iron building erected later in his garden at Sunnyside, Banbury Road, Oxford—he, with a few assistants, began to erect the fabric of the greatest lexicographical achievement of the present age.
His absorption in the Dictionary imposed the most stringent limits upon Murray's time and opportunities for independent work, which virtually came to an end with his article on the English language written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1878. The quality of this piece of work and of his earlier original contributions to philological learning is a sure indication of the possibilities that were within Murray's reach, had his genius been left free to develop untrammelled by the necessity of supplying the printers with a regular quota of Dictionary copy. The editions of three Scottish texts, brought out between 1871 and 1875, Sir David Lyndesay's Works, part v, The Complaynte of Scotlande, and The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, are excellent examples of his talent in this kind; while his Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1873) is remarkable not only for the accuracy of its information and for its author's grasp of the technicalities of phonetic science (then still in its infancy), but also for the rigour of its philological method, the principles of which were at that time appreciated by but few scholars in this country; it remains to this day in many respects a pattern of method for investigations in similar fields. Among Murray's many contributions to the Athenæum during these years was a review of Skeat's edition of the Anglo-Saxon gospels, in which he
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