Author: Way, Gregory Lewis
Biography:
WAY, Gregory Lewis (1756-99: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 27 Dec. 1756 and baptised on 22 Jan. 1757 at St. Mary Magdalen, Richmond, the son of Lewis Way and his wife Sarah Payne. He went to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated 28 Oct. 1774. He then proceeded to the Inner Temple but never seems to have been interested in the law. He married Ann Frances Paxton (1760-1833), the daughter of the Rev. William Paxton, Rector of Taplow, Buckinghamshire, on 9 Dec. 1779 at St. George the Martyr, Queen Square, Bloomsbury. They went on to have at least eight children. He retired with the family to Spencer Farm, Essex, and pursued his literary interests. He published a novel, Learning at a Loss (1778). His Poems (1782) consisted of two Colin Clout persona poems on a lost love and his loss of interest in the law, together with a poem on his new vocation, "The Flights of Fancy." His final years were spent working on translations of medieval French manuscripts on which he collaborated with George Ellis: Fabliaux or Tales (2 vols. 1796-1800). Ellis edited and contributed a largely uninformative memoir to the second posthumous volume. This was reprinted by Samuel Egerton Brydges in his Censuria Literaria (1807), 4:315-20, and used by William Hazlitt in his edition of Johnson’s Lives (1854), which included new poets of which Way was surprisingly one. He died on 26 Apr. 1799 at Spencer Farm, and was buried on 4 May at St. Andrew, Great Yeldham. (ancestry.co.uk 19 Nov. 2020; Gloucester Journal 13 May 1799; Bury and Norwich Post 16 Oct. 1833) AA