Among those of his parochial labours which demanded not a small amount of self-sacrifice were the rebuilding and the improved organization of the schools; |Parochial labours.| the building of a district church—St. Andrew’s—in Ashley Place; and the establishment of Working-Class Lectures, upon a wise and far-seeing plan.
Further contributions to literature.
In 1851, he gave to scholars the curious palimpsest fragments of Homer from a Nitrian manuscript (now Addit. MS., 17,210), and, two years afterwards, the Ecclesiastical History of John, Bishop of Ephesus. This was quickly translated into German by Schönfehler, and into English by Dr. R. Payne Smith. |MS. Addit. 14,640. (B. M.)| Then came the Spicilegium Syriacum, containing fragments of Bardesanes, of Melito of Sardes, and the inexpressibly precious fragments of an ancient recension of the Syriac Gospels, believed by Cureton to be of the fifth century, and offering considerable and most interesting divergences from the Peshito version.
In a preface to these evangelical fragments of the fifth century, their editor contends that they constitute a far more faithful representation of the true Hebrew text than does the Peshito recension, and that the remark holds good, in a more especial degree, of the Gospel of St. Matthew. This publication appeared in 1858.
Labour and its rewards in fresh labours.
Enough has been said of these untiring labours to make it quite intelligible, even to readers the most unfamiliar with Oriental studies, that their author had become already a celebrity throughout learned Europe. As early as in 1855, the Institute of France welcomed Dr. Cureton, as one of their corresponding members, in succession to his old master, Gaisford, of Christ Church. In 1859, the Queen conferred on him a distinction, which was especially appropriate and dear to his feelings. He became ‘Royal Trustee’ of that Museum which he had so zealously served as an Assistant-Keeper of the MSS., up to the date of his appointment to his Westminster parish and canonry. No fitter nomination was ever made. Unhappily, he was not to be spared very long to fill a function so congenial.
Yet one other distinction, and also one other and most honourable labour, were to be his, before another illustrious victim was to be added to the long list of public losses inflicted on the country at large by the gross mismanagement, and more particularly by what is called—sardonically, I suppose—the ‘economy’ of our British railways. Cureton’s life too, like some score of other lives dear to literature or to science, was to be sacrificed under the car of our railway Juggernaut.
In 1861, he published, from another Nitrian manuscript, Eusebius’ History of the Martyrs in Palestine. |The removal, and its circumstances.| Early in 1863, he succeeded the late Beriah Botfield in the Chair of the Oriental Translation Fund. On the twenty-ninth of May, of the same year, a railway ‘accident’ inflicted upon him such cruel injuries as entailed a protracted and painful illness of twelve months, and ended—to our loss, but to his great gain—in his lamented death, on the seventeenth of June, 1864.
He died where he was born, and was buried with his fathers. The writer of these poor memorial lines upon an admirable man well remembers the delight he used to express (thirty years ago) whenever it was in his power to revisit his birthplace, and knows that the delight was shared with the humblest of its inhabitants. Dr. Cureton was one of those genuine men who (in the true and best sense of the words) are not respecters of persons. He had a frank, not a condescending, salutation for the lowliest acquaintances of youthful days. And those lowliest were not among the least glad to see his face again at his holiday-visits; nor were they among the least sorrowful to see it, when it bore the fatal, but now to most of us quite familiar, traces of victimism to the mammon-cult of our railway directors.
The archæological explorations in the Levant.