CHANDLER, RICHARD, D.D., one of the most learned and judicious of British travellers during the last century, was born in 1738 at Elson in Hampshire, educated at Winchester school, and subsequently at Queen's College, Oxford. His early publication of fragments from minor Greek poets, with notes, in 1759, showed his fine literary taste; and his splendid edition of the Arundelian marbles, Marmora Oxoniensia, in 1763, with the accurate transcript of the venerable original, his good Latin translation, and judicious conjectures in supplying the lacunae, established his reputation as a scholar and an antiquary.
In 1763 Chandler was sent, with Revett the architect, and Pars a painter, by the Dilettanti Society of England, to explore the antiquities of Ionia and Greece. After spending above a year in Asia Minor, the travellers passed another year in Greece examining Attica and the Peloponnesus, and returned to England in the end of 1766. The result of their joint investigations were the two magnificent folios of Ionian antiquities published in 1769. Chandler published a very valuable collection of inscriptions, entitled Inscriptiones Antiquae pleraeque nondum editae; in Asia Minore et Graecia praesertim Athenis collectae, in a folio volume, at Oxford in 1774. In 1775 he published his Travels in Asia Minor, and in 1776 his Travels in Greece, each in a quarto volume; which have not been surpassed by those of any subsequent traveller. Octavo editions of both, with a memoir of the learned author, appeared in 1835. Dr Chandler married in 1786, and soon after travelled in Switzerland and Italy. In 1800 he obtained the rectory of Tylehurst in Berkshire, in addition to church preferment which he held in Hampshire. He died in Feb. 1810. His posthumous Life of Bishop Waynflete, Lord High Chancellor to Henry VI., was published in 1811. (T. S. T.)