A fowl that inhabits the Chesapeak and the large rivers in Virginia; sometimes of three feet in length.
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Croker
Encyclopedia Britannica
CROKER, John Wilson (1780-1857), statesman and author, was born in Galway on the 20th December 1780. He belonged to a respectable family of English origin that had been settled in Ireland for several generations, being the only son of John Croker, well known and popular as the surveyor-general of Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated in 1800. Immediately afterwards he was entered as a student of Lincoln’s Inn, and in 1802 he was called to the Irish bar. In 1803 he published anonymously Familiar Epistles to J. F. Jones, Esquire, on the State of the Irish Stage, á series of witty and caustic criticisms in verse on the leading dramatists of the day, which passed through several editions in a short time. Equally successful was the Intercepted Letter from China (1805), also anonymous, a satire on Dublin society. In 1807 he published a pamphlet on The State of Ireland, Past and Present, in which he advocated Catholic emancipation. In the following year he entered Parliament as member for Downpatrick, obtaining the seat on petition, though he had been unsuccessful at the poll. The notorious case of the duke of York furnished him with an opportunity of obtaining patronage and place of which he skilfully availed himself. The speech which he delivered on the 14th March 1809, in answer to the charges of Colonel Wardle, was generally regarded as the most able and ingenious defence of the duke that was made in the debate; and to the gratitude of the latter for this service was probably due Croker’s appointment in the close of the year to the office of secretary to the Admiralty, which he held without interruption under various administrations for more than twenty years. In 1827 he became the representative of the university of Dublin, having ...previously sat successively for the boroughs of Athlone, Yarmouth, and Bodmin. He was a determined opponent of the Reform Bill, and vowed that he would never sit in a reformed Parliament; his parliamentary career accordingly terminated in 1832. Two years earlier he had retired from his post at the Admiralty on a pension of £1500 a year. Many of his political speeches were published in a pamphlet form, and they show him to have been a vigorous and effective, though somewhat unscrupulous and often virulently personal, party debater. The same character attaches to him in his capacity as a political writer. He was one of the founders of the Quarterly Review, and for many years was one of its leading contributors on political and historical subjects. The rancorous spirit in which many of his articles were written did much to embitter party feeling, and to cause men on both sides of greater eminence than himself to stoop to unworthy controversy. It also reacted unfavourably on Croker’s reputation as a worker in the department of pure literature by bringing political animosities into literary criticism. No reply is possible to the majority of the criticisms which Macaulay in his unsparing review brings against Croker’s magnum opus, his edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1831), but with all these defects the work had merits which Macaulay was of course not concerned to point out. It certainly possessed whatever evidence of excellence is afforded by the fact of a very extensive circulation. Its success in this respect led the publisher to propose to Croker the preparation of an annotated edition of Pope’s works, on which he was occupied for several years. - It was left unfinished at the time of his death, but it has since been completed by Peter Cunningham and the Rev. W. El win, and published. A list of Croker’s other chief works is given below. Special mention, however, may be made of his Stories from the History of England for Children, not only because it had a very large circulation, but because it was taken by Scott as the model for his Tales of a Grandfather. In an amusing letter to Croker accompanying a presentation copy of the latter work, Sir Walter speaks of it as “a sample of the swag."
Croker did good service to the cause of literature and art by other means besides his pen. He was one of the founders of the Athenaeum Club. In his place in Parliament he advocated the claims of the fine arts upon state recognition and aid at a time when these claims had fewer supporters than they have now. In his later years his house at West Molesey near Hampton Court was the resort of many eminent literary men, chiefly of his own party. He died at St Albans Bank, Hampton, on the 10th August 1857.
The chief works of Croker not already mentioned were his Letters on the Naval War with America; A Reply to the Letters of Malachi Malagrowthaer ; Military Events of the French Revolution of 1830; a translation of Bassompierre’s Embassy to England; and several lyrical pieces of some merit, such as the Songs of Trafalgar. He also edited the Suffolk Papers, Hervey’s Memoirs of the Court of George I I., the Letters of Lady Hervey, and Walpole ’ s Letters to Lord Hertford.
CROKER, Thomas Crofton (1798-1854), an antiquary and humourist, was born in Cork in 1798. He was apprenticed to a merchant, but in 1819, through the interest of John Wilson Croker, who had been a friend of his father, he became a junior clerk in the Admiralty, where he afterwards obtained one of the first clerkships. In 1825 he produced his most popular book, the Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland (reprinted in 1834), which he followed up by the publication of his Legends of the Lakes, his Adventures of Barney Mahoney, and an edition of the Popular Songs of Ireland. In 1827 he was made a member of the Irish Academy; and in 1839 and 1840 he helped to found the Camden and Percy Societieε, for the former of which he published (1841) an edition of certain Narratives Illustrative of the Contests in Ireland in 1641 and 1690, and for the latter his Revolution in Ireland in 1688, and several other works. He was also a member of the Hakluyt, Archaeological, and Antiquarian Societies. He died in London, August 8, 1854.
9th ed. Encyclopædia Britannica, vol. 6, p. 595
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