disadvantages of a modernized text, and said that an editor who knows his business is better without a colleague. While the Cambridge Shakespeare was in progress, he edited with Clark the Globe Shakespeare (1864); and when it was complete he edited with him in the Clarendon Press series The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Macbeth, and Hamlet between 1868 and 1872. Thereafter he carried on the series alone, and added thirteen plays between 1874 (The Tempest) and 1897 (1 Henry IV). Besides presenting a mass of new material he was the first editor to give due attention to the Elizabethan usage of words. Every later editor has recognized the value of this series. It was in his nature to be silent about poetic beauty and dramatic genius; but learning, accuracy, and common sense combined to make him our greatest Shakespearian scholar since Edmund Malone.
In 1864 Wright undertook to collaborate with John Earle [q.v.] and Henry Bradshaw on an edition of Chaucer which ultimately became the Oxford Chaucer, edited by Walter William Skeat [q.v.]; but he retired in 1870, partly under the pressure of new duties. In 1867 he printed privately the Clerk's Tale from MS. Dd. 4.24 in the University Library, Cambridge. His other publications during the busy years of his librarianship were an abridgement of the Dictionary of the Bible, called the Concise Dictionary (1865); The Bible Word-Book, begun by Jonathan Eastwood [q.v.], (1866, second edition 1884); the Clarendon Press edition of Bacon's Advancement of Learning (1869), and the Roxburghe Club edition of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode (1869). In 1868 he edited with W. G. Clark and John Eyton Bickersteth Mayor [q.v.] the first number of the Journal of Philology, and he continued as editor till 1913.
In 1870, when Wright became bursar of his college, he also became secretary to the Old Testament revision company. Of its 794 meetings from June 1870 to May 1885, he attended 793. His work on Smith's Dictionary of the Bible had made him highly proficient in Hebrew, a study which he had begun as a schoolboy; but he had the rarer qualification of knowing sixteenth-century English. None of the revisers could have had greater respect than he had for the English of Coverdale, and he is understood to have been largely responsible for the conservatism of the revision. All his official papers, showing every stage of the revision, are now in the Cambridge University Library. While engaged on the revision, he edited Generydes for the Early English Text Society (1873–1878) and ten plays of Shakespeare in the Clarendon Press series. He also contributed to Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (1875–1880) and Dictionary of Christian Biography (1877–1887). In 1887 he completed for the Rolls Series his edition of the Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, which he had been forced to lay aside in 1870.
From 1889 to 1903 Wright edited, as literary executor, the writings of his friend Edward FitzGerald, a pleasant duty which was accompanied till 1895 by his laborious task as bursar, and varied by his exacting revision of the Cambridge Shakespeare and by his editing of separate plays, as well as of a Facsimile of the Milton MS. in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge (1899). He brought out FitzGerald's Letters and Literary Remains in three volumes in 1889, and published the Letters by themselves, with additions (Eversley series) in 1894, the aim of the collection being ‘to let FitzGerald tell the story of his own life’. Letters to Fanny Kemble followed in 1895, Miscellanies (Golden Treasury series) in 1900, and More Letters in 1901. All were combined in the final edition of FitzGerald's Letters and Literary Remains (7 vols., 1902–1903). Wright took care never to come between the author and the reader, but his notes give the information that the reader requires. In all respects he provided an example of how a contemporary ought to be edited.
Till his first serious illness, two years before his death, Wright's energies were unwearied. His work after the age of seventy continued to show the same wide range; in quality it never varied. For the Pitt Press (of which he was a syndic from 1872 to 1910) he edited Milton's Poems with critical notes (1903), the English Works of Roger Ascham (1904), and the Authorized Version of the Bible as printed in the original two issues (5 vols., 1909). In 1905 he brought out the third edition of Bishop Westcott's History of the Bible (undertaken at Westcott's request in 1901) and a Commentary on the Book of Job from a Hebrew MS. in the Cambridge University Library. Then he turned to Anglo-Norman and presented the Roxburghe Club with an edition of the long-lost Trinity College MS. of Femina (1909). For his last work he fittingly chose an edition of the six English translations of the Psalms from
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