Thomas Keightley

Keightley, born in October 1789, was the son of Thomas Keightley of Newtown, County Kildare, and claimed to be related to Thomas Keightley (1650?–1719). He entered Trinity College Dublin, on 4 July 1803, but left without a degree, and due to poor health he was forced to abandon the pursuit of the legal profession and admission to the Irish Bar. he was capable of producing translations of tales from Pentamerone or The Nights of Straparola in Fairy Mythology, and he struck up a friendship with the patriarch of the Rossetti household. Thomas claimed to be literate in twenty-odd languages and dialects in all, and published a number of translations and digests of medieval and foreign works and passages, often sparsely treated elsewhere in the English language, including the expanded prose versions of Ogier the Dane which conveys the hero to Morgan le Fay's Fairyland, or Swedish ballads on nixes and elves, such as Harpans kraft ("Power of the Harp") and '''' ("Sir Olof in Elve-Dance"). ==Folklore and mythology ==

Keithley was one of "early and important comparativist collectors" of folklore, and "For an early book of folklore The Fairy Mythology sets high standards". Publication history The Fairy Mythology underwent several printings (1833, 1850, 1878, etc.) in the 19th century. The 1878 edition was reprinted a century later retitled as The World Guide to Gnomes, Fairies, Elves and Other Little People (New York: Avenel Books, 1978). Tales and Popular Fictions Keightley's Tales and Popular Fictions; their Resemblances and Transmissions from Country to Country, appeared in 1834. ==Historical works==

Keightley was long occupied in compiling historical manuals for instructional use and popular enlightenment. His Outlines of History was one of the early volumes of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia (1829). His History of the War of Greek Independence (1830) forms volumes lx. and lxi. of ''Constable's Miscellany.'' In 1850, Keightley wrote immodestly of his historical output as "yet unrivalled, and may long be unsurpassed." was derivative of the labors of the German classical historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and Keightley's patron or mentor Arnold was a subscriber of Niebuhr's approach. Samuel Warren, in his Legal Studies, 3rd ed. 1854 (i. 235–6, 349), highly praises his historical work. But he ludicrously overestimated all his performances, and his claim to have written the best history of Rome in any language, or to be the first to justly value Virgil and Sallust, could not be admitted by his friends. During the last years of his life he received a pension from the civil list. He died at Erith, Kent, on 4 Nov 1872. and later reprinted in 1848. ==Literary criticisms==

Keightley edited Virgil's Bucolics and Georgics (1847), which was prefigured by his Notes on the Bucolics and Georgics of Virgil with Excursus, terms of Husbandry, and a Flora Virgiliana, (1846). Other Latin classics he edited were Horace, Satires and Epistles (1848), Ovid, Fasti (1848), and Sallust, Catilina and Jugurtha (1849). He is listed among the "distinguished file" in one survey of past commentaries on Milton, going back three centuries (). Appreciation of allusions in Milton's poems require familiarity with classical Greco-Roman mythology and epics; to borrow the words of an American contemporary Thomas Bulfinch: "Milton abounds in .. allusions" to classical mythology, and especially "scattered profusely" throughout Milton's Paradise Lost. Keightley was one annotator who meticulously tracked Milton's mythological sources. Some of Keightley's flawed commentary have been pointed out. He argued that Milton erred when he spoke of "Titan, Heaven's first-born," there being no single divine being named Titan, only a race of titans. Though that may be so according to the genealogy laid out by Hesiod's Theogony, it has been pointed out that Milton could well have used alternate sources, such as Lactantius's Divinae Institutiones ("Divine Institutes"), which quotes Ennius to the effect that Uranus had two sons, Titan and Saturn. Likewise regarding Milton's angelology, Keightley had made some correct observations, but he had constrained the source mostly to the Bible, and made mistakes, such as to identify the angel Ithuriel as a coinage. Other commentary Keightley also published an unannotated edition of Shakespeare (6 vols. 1864), followed by a study guide entitled ''Shakespeare Expositor: an aid to the perfect understanding of Shakespeare's plays'' (1867). He also wrote of Henry Fielding's peculiarism of using the antiquated "hath" and "doth" ( ''Fraser's Magazine'', 1858), without acknowledging a commentator who made the same observation before him. ==Friends and family==

Keightley, a friend to Gabriele Rossetti and firm supporter of the latter's views on Dante, became one of a handful of non-Italians who socialized with the family in the childhood days of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his siblings. Keightley's Fairy Mythology was one of the books Dante Gabriel pored over until the age of ten. William Michael Rossetti's Memoir notes that Keightley had as "his nephew and adopted son, Mr. Alfred Chaworth Lyster" who became a dear friend. A pen and ink likeness of this nephew by Dante Gabriel Rossetti exists, dated 1855. Writings from the Rossetti family provide some other loose information on Keightley's related kin or on his later private life. A record by William Rossetti of a spiritual séance at Keightley's home at Belvedere on 4 January 1866, amusing in its own right, identifies "two Misses Keightley" in attendance, a kinsman named "William Samuel Keightley" who died in 1856 supposed to have made his spiritual presence in the session. It has also been remarked that by this period, Keightley had become as "stone-deaf" as Seymour Kirkup, a person who was corresponding with Keightley on matters of spiritualism and visions. ==Selected publications==

• & Vol. 2 • & Vol. 2 • • • (Reprint of 1878 ed.) • • • —— (1848).Secret Societies of the Middle Ages: With Illustrations, New edition, C. Cox. • —— (1834). The Crusaders, or Scenes, Events, and Characters from the times of the Crusaders. 1834. • —— (1838). The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy. • —— (1845). The History of Greece. Whittaker and Company, London. • —— (1860). The Manse of Mastland. A translation of Schetsen uit de pastorij te Mastland, the Dutch novel by . ==Explanatory notes==

References ;Citations ;Bibliography • • • • • • • • ==External links==