s attempts had been far below the modern standard in these
particulars, and Burton's history will always be memorable as marking an
epoch. His chief defects as a historian are want of imagination and an
undignified familiarity of style, which, however, at least preserves his
history from the dulness by which lack of imagination is usually
accompanied. His dryness is associated with a fund of dry humour
exceedingly effective in its proper place, as in _The Book Hunter_. As a
man he was loyal, affectionate, philanthropic and entirely estimable.

A memoir of Hill Burton by his wife was prefaced to an edition of _The Book
Hunter_, which like his other works was published at Edinburgh (1882).

(R. G.)

BURTON, SIR RICHARD FRANCIS (1821-1890), British consul, explorer and
Orientalist, was born at Barham House, Hertfordshire, on the 19th of March
1821. He came of the Westmorland Burtons of Shap, but his grandfather, the
Rev. Edward Burton, settled in Ireland as rector of Tuam, and his father,
Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, was an
Irishman by birth and character. His mother was descended from the
MacGregors, and he was proud of a remote drop of Bourbon blood piously
believed to be derived from a morganatic union of the Grand Monarque. There
were even those, including some of the Romany themselves, who saw gipsy
written in his peculiar eyes as in his character, wild and resentful,
essentially vagabond, intolerant of convention and restraint. His irregular
education strengthened the inherited bias. A childhood spent in France and
Italy, under scarcely any control, fostered the love of untrammelled
wandering and a marvellous fluency in continental vernaculars. Such an
education so little prepared him for academic proprieties, that when he
entered Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1840, a criticism of his
military moustache by a fellow-undergraduate was resented by a challenge to
a duel, and Burton in various ways distinguished himself by such eccentric
behaviour that rustication inevitably ensued. Nor was he much more in his
element as a subaltern in the 18th Regiment of Bombay Native Infantry,
which he joined at Baroda in October 1842. Discipline of any sort he
abhorred, and the one recommendation of the East India Company's service in
his eyes was that it offered opportunities for studying Oriental life and
languages. He had begun Arabic without a master at Oxford, and worked in
London at