124 Allen, Richard Bawdier Sharpe. Iadt^ 



of the wrens that nested in the south front of his house at Boone, 

 bespoke a nature keenly sensitive to the beauties and finest melodies 

 of Nature." 



Thus we have lost from our ranks a man whose long and uncheck- 

 ered life was made up of those finer instincts which peculiarly 

 fitted him for a journalist, soldier, legislator, historian, and lover 

 of birds. 



RICHARD BOWDLER SHARPE. 



BY J. A. ALLEN. 



With Portrait' (Plate IX). 



Richard Bowdler Sharpe, an Honorary Fellow of the Ameri- 

 can Ornithologists' Union, died at his home in Chiswick, I>ondon, 

 on Christmas Day, 1909, at the age of 62 years, after a brief illness 

 from pneumonia. 



Dr. Sharpe was born in London, November 22, 1847, the eldest 

 son of Thomas Bowdler Sharpe, a well-known publisher in London, 

 and grandson of the Rev. Lancelot Sharpe, rector of All Hallows 

 Staining, London, and for many years headmaster of St. Saviour's 

 Grammar School in Southark. At the age of six he Avas placed 

 in the care of an aunt, who kept a preparatory school at Brighton, 

 where he passed three years. At nine he was transferred to a 

 grammar school in Peterborough, of which his cousin, the Rev. 

 James Wallace, was master. Here he "gained a King's Scholar- 

 ship, which not only guaranteed his education but carried with it 

 a small amount of money." Later his cousin accepted the head 

 mastership of a grammar school at Loughborough, and young 

 Sharpe followed him to his new post where he continued to win 

 the chief prizes of the school. At the age of sixteen, at the instance 

 of his father, he went to London and took a clerkship in the estab- 

 lishment of W. H. Smith & Son, and two years later entered the 

 employment of B. Quaritch, the eminent London publisher and 

 bookseller. At the age of nineteen he was appointed librarian to 

 the Zoological Society, which office he held for five years, when, 



1 Reproduced, with permission, from 'British Birds,' Vol. Ill, February, 1910. 



