Etheredge deserves to hold a more distinguished place in English literature than has generally been allotted to him. In a dull and heavy age, he inaugurated a period of genuine wit and sprightliness. He invented the comedy of intrigue, and led the way for the masterpieces of Congreve and Sheridan. Before his time the manner of Ben Jonson had prevailed in comedy, and traditional “humours” and typical eccentricities, instead of real characters, had crowded the comic stage. Etheredge paints with a light, faint hand, but it is from nature, and his portraits of fops and beaux are simply unexcelled. No one knows better than he how to present a gay young gentleman, a Dorimant, “an unconfinable rover after amorous adventures.” His genius is as light as thistle-down; he is frivolous, without force of conviction, without principle; but his wit is very sparkling, and his style pure and singularly picturesque. No one approaches Etheredge in delicate touches of dress, furniture and scene; he makes the fine airs of London gentlemen and ladies live before our eyes even more vividly than Congreve does; but he has less insight and less energy than Congreve. Had he been poor or ambitious, he might have been to England almost what Molière was to France, but he was a rich man living at his ease, and he disdained to excel in literature. Etheredge was “a fair, slender, genteel man, but spoiled his countenance with drinking.” His contemporaries all agree in acknowledging that he was the soul of affability and sprightly good-nature.
The life of Etheredge was first given in detail by Edmund Gosse in Seventeenth Century Studies (1883). His works were edited by A.W. Verity, in 1888.
(E. G.)
ETHERIDGE, JOHN WESLEY (1804-1866), English nonconformist divine, was born near Newport, Isle of Wight, on the 24th of February 1804. He received most of his early education from his father. Though he never attended any university he acquired ultimately a thorough knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, French and German. In 1824 he was placed on the Wesleyan Methodist plan as a local preacher. In 1826 his offer to enter the ministry was accepted, and after the usual probationary trial he was received into full connexion at the conference of 1831. For two years after this he remained at Brighton, and in 1833 he removed to Cornwall, being stationed successively at the Truro and Falmouth circuits. From Falmouth he removed to Darlaston, where in 1838 his health gave way. For a good many years he was a supernumerary, and lived for a while at Caen and Paris, where in the public libraries he found great facilities for prosecuting his favourite Oriental studies. His health having considerably improved, he became, in 1843, pastor of the Methodist church at Boulogne. He returned to England in 1847, and was appointed successively to the circuits of Islington, Bristol, Leeds, Penzance, Penryn, Truro and St Austell in east Cornwall. Shortly after his return to England he received the degree of Ph.D. from the university of Heidelberg. He was a patient, modest, hard-working and accurate scholar. He died at Camborne on the 24th of May 1866.
His principal works are Horae Aramaicae (1843); History, Liturgies and Literature of the Syrian Churches (1847); The Apostolic Acts and Epistles, from the Peshito or Ancient Syriac (1849); Jerusalem and Tiberias, a Survey of the Religious and Scholastic Learning of the Jews (1856); The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan ben Uzziel (1st vol. in 1862, 2nd in 1865). See Memoir, by Rev. Thornley Smith (1871).
ETHERIDGE, ROBERT (1819-1903), English geologist and palaeontologist, was born at Ross, in Herefordshire, on the 3rd of December 1819. After an ordinary school education in his native town, he obtained employment in a business house in Bristol. There he devoted his spare time to natural history pursuits, and in 1850 was appointed curator of the museum attached to the Bristol Philosophical Institution. He also became lecturer on botany in the Bristol medical school. In 1857, through the influence of Sir Roderick I. Murchison, he was appointed to a post in the Museum of Practical Geology in London, and eventually became palaeontologist to the Geological Survey. In 1865 he assisted Prof. Huxley in the preparation of a Catalogue of Fossils in the Museum of Practical Geology. His chief work for many years was in naming the fossils collected during the progress of the Geological Survey, and in supplying the lists that were appended to numerous official memoirs. In this way he acquired an exceptional knowledge of British fossils, and he ultimately prepared an elaborate work entitled Fossils of the British Islands, Stratigraphically and Zoologically arranged. Only the first volume dealing with the Palaeozoic species was published (1888). Etheridge also was author of several papers on the Rhaetic Beds, and of an important essay on the Physical Structure of North Devon, and on the Palaeontological Value of the Devonian Fossils (1867). He edited, and in the main rewrote, the second part of a new edition of John Phillips’ Manual of Geology—entitled Stratigraphical Geology and Palaeontology (1885). He was elected F.R.S. in 1871, and was president of the Geological Society in 1881-1882. In 1881 Etheridge was transferred from the Geological Survey to the geological department of the British Museum, where he served as assistant keeper until 1891. He died at Chelsea, London, on the 18th of December 1903.
Memoir by Dr Henry Woodward (with list of works and portrait) in Geological Magazine, January 1904; also Memoir by H.B. Woodward (with portrait) in Proc. Bristol Nat. Soc. x. 175.