Thomas Sprat

Thomas Sprat 1635-1713, English author, bishop of Rochester and dean of Westminster. His poem on the death of Oliver Cromwell was published in Dryden's Miscellany (1659). Sprat is best remembered for his History of the Royal Society (1667), of which he was one of the first members.

Sprat, Thomas (1635–1713), bishop of Rochester and dean of Westminster. As a writer he is chiefly remembered for his history of the Royal Society (1667), of which he was one of the first members, but he was also known as a poet (The Plague of Athens, 1659, was his most popular poem) and for his life of his friend Cowley, which was attached to Cowley's works from 1668 onwards.

ROYAL SOCIETY, full name Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge. The oldest continuously functioning scientific society in Britain and the world. It was founded in 1660 as the Royal Society for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, and granted royal charters in 1662 and 1663, when it acquired its present name. In its early years, the Society showed a brief inclination to ‘improve the English tongue, paricularly for philosophic purposes’, setting up in 1664 a committee with that end in view. Among its 22 members were the poets John Dryden and Edmund Waller, Bishop Thomas Sprat, and the diarist John Evelyn. However, the committee met only a few times and achieved nothing, despite considering a GRAMMAR of English and the omission of superfluous letters from the orthography. In his History of the Royal Society (1667), Sprat continued the discussion by arguing that the Society should require of its members ‘a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants, before that of wits and scholars’. The Society took such matters no further, however, and this limited exercise was as close as England came to forming anything like the Académie française.