Stopford Brooke

The Rev Stopford Augustus Brooke (14 November 1832 – 18 March 1916) was an Irish clergyman, royal chaplain and writer.

Early life and education Brooke was born on 14 November 1832 at Glendoen, County Donegal to The Rev Richard Sinclair Brooke, a curate, and Anna Brooke , the daughter of the rector Joseph Stopford. The eldest of eight siblings, Brooke was the brother of the public servant, preacher, and educationalist William Graham Brooke. Following Stopford's death in 1833, Brooke's father took a curacy in Abbeyleix, County Laois before becoming the chaplain at the Mariners' church, Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1836.

From 1847 to 1849, Brooke was a boarder at a grammar school in Kidderminster before attending Kingston Grammar School during 1849 and 1850.

He gave the inaugural lecture to the Irish Literary Society, London, on "The Need and Use of Getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue" (Bloomsbury House, 11 March 1893).

He delivered a sermon on "The Kingdom of God Within" to the International Council of Unitarian and Other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers, meeting in London in May 1901.

Family life and death On 23 March 1858, Brooke married Emma Diana Brooke (née Wentworth Beaumont; 1831–1874), the daughter of the British politician Thomas Wentworth Beaumont. Brooke's second daughter Maud married T. W. Rolleston, the Irish writer; his fourth daughter Olive married L. P. Jacks, philosopher, Unitarian minister and Principal of Manchester College, Oxford; and his fifth daughter Sybil married L. Leslie Brooke, the artist of children's books: their son Henry was to become Home Secretary.

In 1911, Brooke built a house in Cranleigh, Surrey, called Four Winds. An art collector, he left the work The Cock Tavern at Cheam by Richard Wilson to the Tate Galleries.

Selected bibliography Various volumes of sermons Poems (1888) Dove Cottage (1890) Theology in the English Poets Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Burns (1874) Notes on the Liber Studiorum of J. M. W. Turner (1885; a later publication on the same subject "suggested by the writings of Mr. Ruskin") Tennyson, his Art and Relation to Modern Life (1894) A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue (co-edited with his son-in-law T.W.Rolleston) (1900) The Poetry of Robert Browning (1902) On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (1905) The Life Superlative (1906)