Author: Schomberg, Alexander Crowcher
Biography:
SCHOMBERG, Alexander Crowcher (1756-92: ODNB)
pseudonym Cornelius Scriblerus Notus
He was born at Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, on 6 July 1756 and baptised at St. Nicholas on 26 July, the seventh of ten children of Dr. Ralph Schomberg (q.v.), physician and writer, and his wife Elizabeth Crowcher (1719-1807), who had married in Southwark, London, in 1742. He was educated at Southampton school and Winchester (under Joseph Warton), proceeding to Queen’s College Oxford (matric. 1775, BA 1779, MA 1781). He was probationer fellow of Magdalen in 1782 and became dean of arts in 1791. From the age of sixteen he contributed a number of poems to Lady Anne Miller’s (q.v.) Bath-Easton circle, Poetical Amusements at a Villa near Bath (1775-81). He was also said to have contributed to Thomas Monro’s (q.v.) periodical Olla Podrida (44 nos. 1788) but Monro did not list him as a contributor and, as a Magdalen man himself who dedicated the volume to the President and Fellows, Monro would surely have known him. One paper was unidentified but there is no reason to assume it is Schomberg’s. As an undergraduate he wrote Bagley (1777; for the argument in favour of Schomberg as the author see the headnote for Thomas Burgess in this database) and its companion piece Ode on the Present State of English Poetry (1779). He then turned his interests first to law with An Historical and Chronological View of Roman Law (1785) and A Treatise on the Maritime Laws of Rhodes (1786) and then to political economy with Historical and Political Remarks on the Tariff of the Commercial Treaty with France (1787). A final work mentioned by his friend and obituarist Sir Herbert Croft as partly printed but not published and left unfinished at his death, Present State of Trade and Manufactures in France, appears not to have survived. He suffered “a stroke of the palsy” around 1790 and was partially paralysed. He was sometimes attended by Robert Southey (q.v.) who found him in “deplorable solitude.” (Southey “on the brink of death” with a fever had been treated earlier by Schomberg’s father.) He died on 6 Apr. 1792 and was buried in Bath Abbey. (ODNB 2 Sept. 2021; GM Apr. 1792, 389; The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey [1849] 1: 36) AA