John Burgon

Burgon was born at Smyrna (now İzmir), on 21 August 1813, the son of Thomas Burgon an English merchant trading in Turkey who was also a skilled numismatist and afterwards became an assistant in the antiquities department of the British Museum. His mother is often said to have been Greek but was in fact the daughter of the Austrian consul at Smyrna and his English wife. During his first year the family moved to London, where he was sent to school. After a few years of business life, working in his father's counting-house, Burgon went to Worcester College, Oxford, in 1841, and took his degree in 1845. He has been described as a high churchman of the type prevalent before the rise of the Tractarian school. His collection of transcripts from the Greek Fathers, illustrating the text of the New Testament, was bequeathed to the British Museum. Burgon died unmarried at the deanery, Chichester, on 4 August 1888. He was buried in the family grave at Holywell Cemetery in Oxford on 11 August. He is commemorated by a plaque set in the floor of Chichester Cathedral's south transept and by a window in the lady chapel. ==Literary works==

In 1845, Burgon won the Newdigate Prize, for poems by students at Oxford University, for his poem Petra, about the city of the same name, now in Jordan, which he had never seen. An excerpt describing the buildings has often been reprinted: The poem is chiefly remembered for the famous final line above, which quotes the phrase "half as old as time" from Samuel Rogers. This fourteen-line excerpt is often referred to as a "sonnet," but the poem is 370 lines long, in rhymed couplets. Burgon published it, apparently in a small pamphlet, in around 1845. A "Second Edition", "To Which a Few Short Poems Are Now Added," was published in 1846, and the text above follows that version. It contained some revisions: "sanctifies" had been "consecrates"; "call'd" had been "deemed"; "But rosy-red,—as if the blush of dawn" had been "But rose-red as if the blush of dawn", and so on. There was also an 1885 book containing the poem. Hugh Kenner commented on the precision of Burgon's language: :Though romantic, Burgon was being workmanlike. To his generation the age of Time was quite definite; for since Adam was created in the year 4004 B.C. on 23 October, Time in the year Burgon wrote, 1845, was exactly 5849 years old, going back through half of which we locate the founding of Petra at 1080 B.C. He did not publish any other poetry. His biographical essays on Henry Longueville Mansel and others were also collected, and published under the title of Twelve Good Men (1888). ==Burgon in modern times==

The name of Burgon is now known in connection with the Burgon Society, which was founded in 2000 to promote the use and study of academical dress, so named because Burgon is the only person to have a hood shape named after him. Another society which takes his name is the Dean Burgon Society. Burgon was outspoken about the Revised Version and maintained the position that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, but some of his views have differed from the more recent King James Only Movement. The phrase 'match me such marvel' taken from Burgon's poem Petra serves as the fictional title of a novel by the character St John Clarke in Anthony Powell's twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time. ==Theological works==

• The Book of Common Prayer: With Illustrations Chiefly from the Old Masters, with Henry John Rose. • A Plain Commentary on the Four Holy Gospels (in volumes) • Inspiration and Interpretation: Seven Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford (1861) • The Last Twelve Verses of Mark (1871) • The Servants of Scripture (1878) • The Revision Revised (1881) • Letters to Dr. Scrivener : Sacred Greek codices at home and abroad (1882) • The First Chapter of Genesis: A Reply and a Postscript (1886) Posthumously edited works • Causes of Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels (1896) • The Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels vindicated and established (1896) • Edward Miller, A Textual Commentary Upon the Holy Gospels, Part I, Matthew i-xiv: Largely From the use of Materials, and Mainly on the Text, Left by the Late John William Burgon (1899) ==Other publications==