to a firm of solicitors, but was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1827. On his marriage in 1823 with Elizabeth, daughter of Dawson Turner of Great Yarmouth, he had become a Christian, and had changed his name to Palgrave, the maiden name of his wife’s mother. His work as a barrister was chiefly concerned with pedigree cases before the House of Lords. He edited for the Record Commission Parliamentary Writs (London, 1827–1834); Rotuli curiae regis (London, 1835); The antient kalendars and inventories of the treasury of his majesty’s exchequer (London, 1836); and Documents and records illustrating the history of Scotland (London, 1837), which contains an elaborate introduction. In 1831 he published his History of England, Anglo-Saxon Period, later editions of which were published as History of the Anglo-Saxons; in 1832, his Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth, pronounced by Freeman a “memorable book”; and in 1834 his Essay upon the original authority of the king’s council. In 1832 he was knighted, and after serving as one of the municipal corporations commissioners, became deputy-keeper of the public records in 1838, holding this office until his death at Hampstead on the 6th of July 1861. Palgrave’s most important work is his History of Normandy and England, which appeared in four volumes (London 1851–1864), and deals with the history of the two countries down to 1101.
He also wrote Truths and Fictions of the Middle Ages (London, 1837, and again 1844); The Lord and the Vassal (London, 1844); and Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (London, 1842, and subsequent editions).
Palgrave’s four sons were: Francis Turner Palgrave (q.v.), sometime professor of poetry at Oxford; William Gifford Palgrave; Sir Robert Harry Inglis Palgrave (b. 1827), an authority upon banking and economics generally; and Sir Reginald Francis Douce Palgrave.
William Gifford Palgrave (1826–1888) went to India as a soldier after a brilliant career at Charterhouse School and Trinity College, Oxford; but, having become a Roman Catholic, he was ordained priest and served as a Jesuit missionary in India, Syria, and Arabia. Forsaking the priesthood about 1864, he was employed as a diplomatist by the British government in Egypt, Asia Minor, the West Indies, and Bulgaria, being appointed resident minister in Uruguay in 1884; he died at Montevideo on the 30th of September 1888. He wrote a romance, Hermann Agha (London, 1872), A Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (London, 1865), Essays on Eastern Questions (London, 1872), and other works.
Sir Reginald Palgrave (1829–1904) became a solicitor in 1851; but two years later was appointed a clerk in the House of Commons, becoming clerk of the House on the retirement of Sir Erskine May in 1886. He was made a K.C.B. in 1892, retired from his office in 1900, and died at Salisbury on the 13th of July 1904. Sir Reginald wrote The Chairman’s Handbook; The House of Commons: Illustrations of its History and Practice (London, 1869); and Cromwell: an appreciation based on contemporary evidence (London, 1890). He also assisted to edit the tenth edition of Erskine May’s Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament (London, 1896).
PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER (1824–1897), English critic and poet, eldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave, the historian, was born at Great Yarmouth, on the 28th of September 1824. His childhood was spent at Yarmouth and at his father’s house in Hampstead. At fourteen he was sent as a day-boy to Charterhouse; and in 1843, having in the meanwhile travelled extensively in Italy and other parts of the continent, he proceeded to Oxford, having won a scholarship at Balliol. In 1846 he interrupted his university career to serve as assistant private secretary to Gladstone, but returned to Oxford the next year, and took a first class in Literae Humaniores. From 1847 to 1862 he was fellow of Exeter College, and in 1849 entered the Education Department at Whitehall. In 1850 he accepted the vice-principalship of Kneller Hall Training College at Twickenham. There he came into contact with Tennyson, and laid the foundation of a lifelong friendship. When the training college was abandoned, Palgrave returned to Whitehall in 1855, becoming examiner in the Education Department, and eventually assistant secretary. He married, in 1862, Cecil Grenville Milnes, daughter of James Milnes-Gaskell. In 1884 he resigned his position at the Education Department, and in the following year succeeded John Campbell Shairp as professor of poetry at Oxford. He died in London on the 24th of October 1897, and was buried in the cemetery on Barnes Common. Palgrave published both criticism and poetry, but his work as a critic was by far the more important. His Visions of England (1880–1881) has dignity and lucidity, but little of the “natural magic” which the greatest of his predecessors in the Oxford chair considered rightly to be the test of inspiration. His last volume of poetry, Amenophis, appeared in 1892. On the other hand, his criticism was always marked by fine and sensitive tact, quick intuitive perception, and generally sound judgment. His Handbook to the Fine Arts Collection, International Exhibition, 1862, and his Essays on Art (1866), though not free from dogmatism and over-emphasis, were sincere contributions to art criticism, full of striking judgments strikingly expressed. His Landscape in Poetry (1897) showed wide knowledge and critical appreciation of one of the most attractive aspects of poetic interpretation. But Palgrave’s principal contribution to the development of literary taste was contained in his Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics (1861), an anthology of the best poetry in the language constructed upon a plan sound and spacious, and followed out with a delicacy of feeling which could scarcely be surpassed. Palgrave followed it with a Treasury of Sacred Song (1889), and a second series of the Golden Treasury (1897), including the work of later poets, but in neither of these was quite the same exquisiteness of judgment preserved. Among his other works were The Passionate Pilgrim (1858), a volume of selections from Herrick entitled Chrysomela (1877), a memoir of Clough (1862) and a critical essay on Scott (1866) prefixed to an edition of his poems.
See Gwenllian F. Palgrave, F. T. Palgrave (1899).
PALI, the language used in daily intercourse between cultured people in the north of India from the 7th century B.C. It continued to be used throughout India and its confines as a literary language for about a thousand years, and is still, though in a continually decreasing degree, the literary language of Burma, Siam, and Ceylon. Two factors combined to give Pali its importance as one of the few great literary languages of the world: the one political, the other religious. The political factor was the rise during the 7th century B.C. of the Kosala power. Previous to this the Aryan settlements, along the three routes they followed in their penetration into India, had remained isolated, independent and small communities. Their language bore the same relation to the Vedic speech as the various Italian dialects bore to Latin. The welding together of the great Kosala kingdom, more than twice the size of England, in the very centre of the settled country, led insensibly but irresistibly to the establishment of a standard of speech, and the standard followed was the language used at the court at Sāvatthi in the Nepalese hills, the capital of Kosala. When Gotama the Buddha, himself a Kosalan by birth, determined on the use, for the propagation of his religious reforms, of the living tongue of the people, he and his followers naturally made full use of the advantages already gained by the form of speech current through the wide extent of his own country. A result followed somewhat similar to the effect, on the German language, of the Lutheran reformation. When, in the generations after the Buddha’s death, his disciples compiled the documents of the faith, the form they adopted became dominant. But local varieties of speech continued to exist.
The etymology of the word Pali is uncertain. It probably means “row, line, canon,” and is used, in its exact technical sense, of the language of the canon, containing the documents of the Buddhist faith. But when Pali first became known to Europeans it was already used also, by those who wrote in Pali, of the language of the later writings, which bear the same relation to the standard literary Pali of the canonical texts as medieval
