DAMON or DAMAN, WILLIAM (16th cent.), one of Queen Elizabeth's musicians, is probably the earliest composer who set the Psalms in the vernacular to part-music. His work appeared first in 1579, printed by John Day, with a preface by Edward Hake, who relates how these compositions were secretly ‘gathered together from the fertile soyle of his honest frend, Guilielmo Daman,’ by one ‘John Bull, citezen and goldsmith of London,’ and how Bull ‘ hasted forthwith of himself … to commit the same to the presse.’ The work appeared in four oblong quarto part-books, and is now of great rarity, the edition probably being bought up by the composer or his friends. In 1591 another version of Daman's Psalms appeared from Thomas East's press. This work was published by William Swayne, and by him dedicated to Lord Burghley. In the preface to this work Swayne says that the former publication ‘not answering the expectation that many had of the auctor's skill, gave him occasion to take uppon him a new labour to recover the wrong his friend did in publishing that that was so done.’ The work appeared in two forms, in one of which the melody of the psalm is in the tenor part, in the other in the treble. Both versions are in four separate part-books. The words of both the 1579 and 1591 editions are taken from Sternhold and Hopkins's version of the Psalms, but the contents of the two editions are not the same. Neither is entered in the register of the Stationers' Company. In the later publication Daman is styled ‘late one of her Majestie's Musitions.’ It is possible that he was dead when it appeared. The only other extant compositions of his are a Miserere and some sacred music in lute tablature preserved in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 5054, 31992, 29246).
[Hawkins's Hist. of Music, iii. 579; Burney's Hist. of Music, iii. 53; Tanner's Bibl. Brit. ed. 1748, 217.]
DAMPIER, THOMAS, D.D. (1748–1812), bishop of Ely, eldest son of Dr. Thomas Dampier, who was lower master at Eton and from 1774 dean of Durham, was born in 1748. He was educated at Eton, and in 1766 elected to King's College, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. 1771, M.A. 1774, D.D. 1780. After taking his degree he resided for some time at Eton as private tutor to the Earl of Guilford, holding at the same time the vicarage of Bexley in Kent, while a few years later he succeeded to the mastership of Sherborne Hospital, which his father obtained leave to resign in his favour. In 1782 he was promoted to the deanery of Rochester, and in 1802 to the bishopric of that diocese. The bishopric of Rochester was a poor one, and it was in his case, for the first time for some years past, separated from the deanery of Westminster. Dampier therefore looked for fresh promotion, and in 1808 was translated to Ely. He died suddenly from an attack of gout in the stomach in the evening of 13 May 812 at Ely House, Dover Street. As a bishop he seems to have made a good impression by his kindliness and liberality; and Archdeacon Law, in a charge delivered a few years after his death, speaks of his having been the first to promote the Christian Knowledge Society in Rochester, and of the bishop himself as 'one whose memory is still dear to us, and whose name every friend to our ecclesiastical establishment must ever revere.' His politics may be inferred from the statement
