Elmsley was ordained a deacon of the
Church of England on 31 December 1797 and a priest on 29 April 1798; on the same date in April 1798 he was appointed perpetual curate to the chapelry of
Little Horkesley in
Essex, which he held until his death. In around 1802 he lived in
Edinburgh, and contributed articles to the
Edinburgh Review on
Heyne's
Iliad,
Schweighäuser's
Athenæus,
Blomfield's
Prometheus, and
Porson's
Hecuba. He also contributed to the
Quarterly Review. From 1807 until 1816 he lived at
St. Mary Cray, Kent, then from 1816 was based mainly in
Oxford. He was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society in 1814. He travelled extensively in
France and
Italy, where he collated manuscripts of the classics, and spent the winter of 1818 examining the manuscripts in the
Laurentian Library at
Florence. In 1819 he was commissioned, with
Sir Humphry Davy, to decipher the
papyri found at
Herculaneum, but the results proved insignificant. In 1823 he was appointed principal of
St Alban Hall,
Oxford, and
Camden Professor of Ancient History. He held both of these appointments until his death, from heart disease, at St Alban Hall, on 8 March 1825. A monument to his memory carved by
Joseph Theakston was placed in
Oxford Cathedral later that year. Elmsley was a man of great learning and
European reputation, and was considered to be the best ecclesiastical scholar in England. He is best known for his collation of the manuscripts of the
Greek tragedians, in particular Sophocles and Euripides, and his important work on restoring their text. Editors who have worked in the same field have praised his careful method and diligence in drawing together authorities for the purposes of illustration. He edited
The Acharnians of
Aristophanes, and several of the plays and
scholia of
Sophocles and
Euripides. He was the first to recognise the importance of the Laurentian manuscript 32.9, a facsimile of a text by Sophocles. == Publications (selection) ==