OBITUARY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 866, 5 October 1888, Page 26

OBITUARY.

By ELucrßio Telegraph.—Copyright. (PER PRESS ASSOCIATION.) London, October 2. Obituary—William Gifford Palgrave, British Minister at Monte Video. [William Gifford Palgrave was one of the sons of the late Sir Francis Palgrave (the others being Mr F. L. Palgrave, Professor of Poetry at Oxford; and Mr R. F. D. Palgrave, Clerk to the House of Commons). He was born in Westminster in 1826 ; educated at the Charterhouse and Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. first class in olassios and second clasß in mathematics in 1846. He was one of the most distinguished of Oriental travellers and linguists, his mastery of the Arabic language being ao complete that in his remarkable journeyings in the East he had invariably been able to pass as a native and had even officiated as a priest in the mosques of Arabia. His “Narrative of a Year’s Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia ” was the book of the season of 1865. He undertook his first journeys into Syria and Palestine (1855) on behalf of the French and Italian branches of the Society of Jesus, and in 1860 he was commissioned by the late Emperor Napoleon 111. to explore the regions of the Ottoman East, in which the persecutions and massacres of Christians had previously taken place. Mr Palgrave.had been successively Consul at Soukhoum-Kalo, Trebizond, Island of St Thomas, Manile, and Consul-General of Bulgaria and Siam, and latterly British Minister at Montevideo.]