Note 283 — Chapter VI · THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY FOUNDRY.

This learned lady, mistress of eight languages besides her own, was the daughter of Ralph Elstob, a Newcastle merchant, and was born in 1683. Besides making the English translation which accompanies her brother’s Latin version of the Homily on St. Gregory’s Day, she transcribed and translated many Saxon works at an early age. “Miss Elstob,” says Rowe Mores, “was a northern lady of ancient family and a genteel fortune. But she pursued too much the drug called learning, and in that pursuit failed of being careful of an one thing necessary. In her latter years she was tutoress in the family of the Duke of Portland, where we have visited her in her sleeping-room at Bulstrode, surrounded with books and dirtiness, the usual appendages of folk of learning. But if any one desires to see her as she was when she was the favourite of Dr. Hudson and the Oxonians, they may view her pourtraiture in the initial G of the English-Saxon Homily on the Birthday of St. Gregory” (Dissertation, p. 29). Miss Elstob died in 1756, and was buried at St. Margaret’s, Westminster.