Matthew Sylvester

Matthew Sylvester (Southwell, c. 1636– London, 1708) was an English nonconformist cleric.

Youth Matthew Sylvester, son of Robert Sylvester, mercer, and his wife Mary Lee, was born at Southwell, Nottinghamshire, about 1636. From Southwell grammar school, on 4 May 1654, at the age of seventeen, he was admitted at St. John's College, Cambridge. He was too poor to stay long at college, but as he kept up his studies while supporting himself in various places, probably by teaching, he became a good linguist and well read in philosophy.

Career About 1659, Sylvester obtained the vicarage of Great Gonerby, Lincolnshire.

In 1696 he issued the long-expected folio, Reliquiæ Baxterianæ. Or, Richard Baxter's Narrative of the most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times; appended is Sylvester's funeral sermon for Baxter. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, no book of its importance was ever worse edited. Sylvester, an unmethodical man, had to deal with ‘a great quantity of loose papers,’ needing to be sorted. He transcribed most of the work himself. He noted that it took his ‘weak hand’ above an hour to write ‘an octavo page’ (Preface, § 1). During the progress of the work he was, according to Calamy, ‘chary of it in the last degree,’ and with great difficulty brought to consent to the few excisions which Calamy deemed necessary. In addition to a fatal lack of arrangement, the folio abounds in misprints, as Sylvester ‘could not attend the press and prevent the errata.’ The ‘contents’ and index are by Calamy, who subsequently issued an octavo Abridgment (1702, 1714), much handier but very inferior in interest to the Reliquiæ.