The New International Encyclopædia/Ralston, William Ralston Shedden-

RALSTON, ra̤l′ston, William Ralston Shedden- (1828-89). An English Russian scholar, and the son of W. P. Ralston Shedden, who, after making a fortune in India, returned to England. He was prepared by a private tutor for Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1850. Though subsequently called to the bar, he never practiced. To free himself from the odium attached to a prolonged lawsuit, begun by his father and continued by his sister, for the Ralston estates in Ayrshire, he added the name of Ralston to Shedden. Entering the printed-book department of the British Museum (1853), he rose rapidly. He learned Russian and traveled extensively in Russia, forming a close friendship with Turgenieff. Owing to ill health, he resigned his post in the British Museum after serving for twenty-two years. He contributed largely to the Athenæum, the Saturday Review, and other periodicals, and published Kriloff and His Fables (1868); a translation of Turgenieff's Liza (1869); Songs of the Russian People (1872); and Early Russian History (1874).