481 



STTARP, WILLIAM. 



SHARPE, DANIEL, F.R.S. 



482 



volumes, only one of which however appeared during his lifetime, 

 have been repeatedly printed. The last edition was published at 

 Oxford iu 1840. Mr. Speaker Onslow, in a note to Burnet's 'History 

 of his Own Times,' says of Sharp, " He was a great reader of Shak- 

 speare. Doctor Mangey, who had married his daughter, told me that 

 he used to recommeud to young divines the reading of the Scriptures 

 and Shakspeare. And Doctor Lisle, bishop of Norwich, who had been 

 chaplain at Lambeth to Archbishop Wade, told me that it was often 

 related there, that Sharp should say that the Bible and Shakspeare 

 made him archbishop of York." The ' Life of Archbishop Sharp,' by 

 his son, Dr. Thomas Sharp, archdeacon of Northumberland, which had 

 been in the hands of the compilers of the ' Biographia Britannica,' was 

 published at London in 2 vols. 8vo, in 1829. 



SHARP,. WILLIAM, an eminent engraver in the line manner, was 

 born on the 29th of January 1749, in Haydon-yard, in the Minories, 

 where his father carried on the business of a gun-maker. He was early 

 apprenticed to an engraver of door-plates, and other such articles, 

 being what is termed a bright engraver. At the expiration of his 

 indentures, Sharp married a French woman, and commenced business 

 in the same line in Bartholomew-lane ; but he soon exercised his 

 talent in the higher branches of the art. His earliest effort was an 

 engraving of the old lion Hector in the Tower of London, from an 

 original drawing by himself. In 1782 he sold his shop, and removed 

 to a private house in Vauxhall, where he ' began to engrave from 

 pictures by the old masters ; and soon after he was engaged, in con- 

 junction with Angus, Heath, and Colly er, in decorating the 'Novelist's 

 Magazine,' with plates after the designs of Stothard. Here he also 

 completed the Landing of Charles II. after West, a work which 

 Woollett had left unfinished ; and he engraved some plates for Cook's 

 ' Voyages ;' and a beautiful oval work, after Bennall, of the Children 

 in the Wood. The profits of his professional employment and a 

 legacy enabled Sharp to take a larger house, and he accordingly 

 removed to Charles-street, Middlesex Hospital. In 1814, when 

 enjoying his highest reputation, he was elected a member of the 

 Imperial Academy of Vienna, and of the Royal Academy of Munich. 

 Sir Joshua Reynolds offered to propose him as an associate of the 

 Royal Academy of London ; but Sharp, coinciding in opinion with 

 \Yoollett, Hall, and other engravers, that the art was slighted by the 

 rule which precludes the election of its professors to the rank of 

 academician, declined the preferred compliment. From London he 

 went to reside at Acton, and finally at Chiswick, where he died of 

 dropsy in the chest, on the 25th July 1824. Amongst the many 

 works of this eminent engraver may be enumerated the Doctors Dis- 

 puting on the Immaculateness of the Virgin, and the Ecce Homo, after 

 Guido ; St. Cecilia, ' after Domenichino ; the Virgin and Child, after 

 Carlo Dolci ; Diogenes, after Salvator Rosa ; the Sortie from Gibraltar, 

 after Trumbull ; the Destruction of the Floating Battery at Gibraltar, 

 after Copley; and the portrait of John Hunter, after Sir Joshua 

 Reynolds. The last engraving is considered to be one of the finest 

 specimens of the art. He also engraved, in some instances, figures in 

 the landscape plates of other persons. As an instance of this may be 

 mentioned the group of Niobe in the print by Samuel Smith, after the 

 original picture by Wilson, now in the National Gallery. 



Mr. Sharp, though in the ordinary transactions of life a man of 

 shrewdness, was, in matters of science and religion, a visionary and an 

 enthusiast. No imposture was too gross for hia belief, and no evidence 

 sufficiently strong to disabuse his mind. The doctrines of Mesmer, 

 the rhapsodies of the notorious Richard Brothers, and the still more 

 disgusting exhibitions of Johanna Southcott, in turn found in him a 

 warm disciple ; and, in the last case, an easy and liberal dupe. By 

 Johanna and her confederates, Mr. Sharp was induced to part with the 

 bulk of his savings, under the delusion that he was purchasing estates 

 in the New Jerusalem. So confident was he in her divine mission, 

 that although she died several years before him, he believed, up to 

 the hour of his own dissolution, that she was only in a trance. In the 

 case of Brothers, ho had so strong an opinion of his prophetic powers, 

 that he engraved two plates of his portrait, lest one should not be 

 sufficient to produce the requisite number of impressions which would 

 be called for on the arrival of the predicted Millenium. Upon these 

 plates he inscribed, " Fully believing this to be the man appointed by 

 God, I engrave his likeness. W. Sharp." [BROTHERS, RICHARD.] 



The general style of Sharp's engraving, though undoubtedly original, 

 was formed from a careful selection of the merits of his eminent pre- 

 decessors and contemporaries. The Lalf-tints and shadows of his best 

 engravings are peculiarly rich ; and his lines combine, with great free- 

 dom, a regularity and accuracy of position rarely attained without 

 mechanical aid. In no quality of his art was he more distinguished 

 than in the power which he possessed of imitating the various textures 

 of the different parts cf his subject, a circumstance which is most 

 obvious in a fine impression of the portrait of John Hunter before 

 alluded to. 



SHARPE, DANIEL, F.R.S., at the time of his decease president of 

 the Geological Society of London, was born in London in 1806. 

 His mother, who died a few weeks after his birth, was sister to 

 Samuel Rogers the poet. He was educated at Walthamstow, and 

 as a boy early showed a taste for the study of natural history, 

 but he did not commence seriously to work at geology till after 

 he had been admitted a Fellow of the Geological Society in June 



1829. In that year he gave his firat memoir to the society, on a new 

 species of Ichthyosaurus, I. grandipes, which however it afterwards 

 appeared had been previously described by Conybeare, under the name 

 of /. tenuirostritt. 



Throughout the greater part of his life, Mr. Sharpe was actively 

 engaged as a merchant, and his business connection with the wine- 

 growing districts of Portugal occasionally leading him there, in 1832, 

 1839, 1848, and 1849, he gave to tho Geological Society a series of 

 memoirs on the rocks of the neighbourhood of Lisbon and Oporto. 

 The first is a mere sketch of the general arrangement of the tertiary 

 and secondary rocks by a young and intelligent geologist; the second, 

 on the same subject, is fuller and more definite, but not sufficiently 

 complete in the determination of fossils to fix the precise age of the 

 strata described. It contains however in an appendix some observa- 

 tions of great value on the comparative effects of the great earthquake 

 of 1755 on the strata on which Lisbon stands. The destructive effects 

 of this shock were chiefly confined to tho area occupied by the soft 

 tertiary beds, while the buildings erected on the more solid Hippurite 

 limestone and chalk escaped entirely. The line of division between 

 the shattered and entire buildings Mr. Sharpe found to correspond 

 precisely with the boundaries of the strata. In his third memoir Mr. 

 Sharpe describes the granitic, gneissic, clay-slate, and coal-bearing 

 rocks of Vallongo near Oporto. The clay-slate he proved by its fossils 

 to be of Lower Silurian age, and his sections show that the strata 

 bearing anthracitic coal underlie the slate, and rest on gneiss pierced 

 by granite. He thence concluded that the coal is of Lower Silurian 

 age. In the obituary notice of Mr. Sharpe given in the ' Anniversary 

 Proceedings' of the Royal Society for 1856, on which the present 

 article is founded, but with omissions, alterations, and additions, the 

 following just remarks occur on this subject : " In the present state 

 of knowledge regarding that country, it is impossible to deny that 

 this may be the case, but it must be remembered that the few remains 

 of plants discovered in these strata are considered by palaeontologists 

 to present characters indicative of ' carboniferous' age ; and even those 

 geologists who most strenously support the so-called uniformitarian 

 doctrines, incline to attribute the peculiar position of the coal to one 

 of those great inversions of the strata so frequent in highly disturbed 

 districts of all ages, from palseozic up to tertiary times." 



The fourth paper commences with a succinct sketch of the general 

 geology of Portugal, and goes on to define the limits of the secondary 

 rocks north of the Tagus, both by stratigraphical and palseontological 

 evidence. Long before this paper was read, Mr. Sharpe had acquired 

 much critical skill and knowledge as a palaeontologist, and on palse- 

 ontological principles he now established tho existence of cretaceous 

 and Jurassic rocks in the country described. The whole formed an 

 excellent sketch of a hitherto undescribed country, and up to this 

 date British geologists are chiefly indebted to these memoirs for 

 the knowledge they possess of a laud where the science is almost 

 uncultivated. 



Between 1842 and 1844 Mr. Sharpe gave four memoirs to the 

 Geological Society, on the Silurian and Old Red-sandstone rocks of 

 Wales and the north of England, territories previously chiefly illus- 

 trated by the labours of Professor Sedgwick. [SEDGWICK, THE REV. 

 ADA.M.] The first of these is ' On the Geology of the South of West- 

 moreland.' Part of this paper describes the range of the Coniston 

 limestone. Mr. Sharpe identified it by its fossils as forming part of 

 the Lower Silurian series, but did not determine its actual horizon. 

 In 1839 Mr. James Garth Marshall, F.G.S., in a paper communicated 

 to the British Association, placed it on the parallel of the Caradoc 

 sandstone, which determination the researches of later geologists have 

 sustained. Mr. Sharpe also pointed out the unconformity of the Upper 

 on the Lower Silurian rocks of the area ; and in describing the passage 

 of the Ludlow rocks into the Old Red-sandstone, he correctly infers 

 that the tilestones of South Wales should be withdrawn from the base 

 of the Old Red-sandstone and classified with the Ludlow rocks, to 

 which their fossils unite them. At a later period of the same year he 

 produced a memoir ' On the Bala Limestone, and other portions of the 

 older Palaeozoic Rocks of North Wales.' Up to this date it was 

 believed that at Bala and elsewhere there was a great thickness of 

 fossiliferous 'Upper Cambrian rocks' of Sedgwick below the Lower 

 Silurian strata. Mr. Sharpe maintained that this was an error, and 

 that both stratigraphically and by their fossils, the Bala rocks wer^ 

 the equivalents of the Llandeilo flags and Caradoc sandstone. This 

 sagacious determination has since been confirmed by Mr. J. W. Salter, 

 F.G.S., as regards the Caradoc sandstone, the fossils of Bala and the 

 typical Caradoc sandstone of Sir Roderick Murchison in Shropshire 

 being the same. 



The more elaborate paper of 1844 is accompanied by a geological 

 map of North Wales, and has been considered less happy. Mr. 

 Sharpe's genius chiefly lay in the palteontological determination of 

 the age of rocks, and, in this case at least, the time he allowed him- 

 self to map North Wales was too short for the satisfactory elucidation 

 of the problems he proposed to solve. 



Pursuing at intervals these subjects, Mr. Sharpe produced in 1847 

 an elaborate analysis and comparison of the Silurian fossils of North 

 America, collected by Sir Charles Lyell, [LYELL, SIB CHARLES], 

 with those of Great Britain, and confirmed the views entertained 

 by the American geologist, Mr. Hall, that the American Silurian 



