Author: Torre, Nicholas Lee
Biography:
TORRE, Nicholas Lee (1795-1867: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 25 June 1795 at Bishop Burton, Yorkshire, the son of James Torre and his second wife Caroline Coates, who had married at Beverley, Yorkshire, in 1792. He was a scholar at Winchester College from 1806 and won the English verse prize in 1813 with “Prometheus Desmotes.” He proceeded to New College Oxford (matric. 1813, Fellow 1815-18). He married Eliza Elliston (1797-1874) on 1 June 1826 at All Saints, Leamington Priors, Warwickshire, where they settled, had six children, and ran a school; he taught classics, she taught dancing (later with her two unmarried daughters Elizabeth and Emma). His two eldest sons went to St. John’s, Cambridge. By 1861 he had retired. His first work, Lucubrationes Poeticae; Consisting of First Love; A Poem (1821), is attributed to him here from three different sources: the Winchester College copy, with a handwritten attribution on the half-title by his near contemporary, the book collector Rev. Peter Hall (1803-49); a newspaper advertisement for his second work, Monimia to Lorenzo (1822), giving him as the author of First Love (sic); the addressee of the poem, Eliza, the name of his future wife. His third work, Amy Robsart, Emma, and Other Poems (1824) exists in a single copy at Harvard but has been digitalised at Hathi. His translations of Oxford and Cambridge Latin prize poems in 1831 and 1833 included the early work of many men who would later be eminent in Victorian society. A later collection, Translations of the Oxford Latin Poems (1848), was dedicated to Gladstone. Torre announced the imminent publication of a second volume but it did not appear. He was, however, best known for his translation into Latin of Thomas Moore’s (q.v.) Irish Melodies (1807-34) as Cantus Hibernici (1835) and Reginald Heber’s (q.v.) Oxford Prize poem Palestine (1803) as Palaestina(1844). He died on 16 Sept. 1867 at Leamington Priors. Eliza Torre also died there, in 1874. He left in manuscript travel memoirs (1803-51) and reminiscences about seeing Metternich and Blücher in the Radcliffe Camera, Oxford, in 1814; his brother’s murder in Demerara in 1818; his honeymoon of 1826; his visit to the Great Exhibition in 1851; and much else. (ancestry.co.uk 15 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 15 Nov. 2022; Bell’s Life 3 Mar. 1822; Common Sense 24 July 1825; GM Nov. 1867, 684; LES 10 Apr. 1874; Bodley, MS. 15530; Richard Foster, Fellows’ Librarian, Winchester College) AA
Other Names:
- Nicholas Torre