GREAVES, JOHN, an eminent mathematician and antiquary, was the eldest son of John Greaves, rector of Colemore, near Alresford in Hampshire, and born in 1602. He went to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1617; was chosen fellow of Merton in 1624; and, six years later, professor of geometry in Gresham College, London. After travelling in Europe, he visited the East in 1637, and collected a considerable number of Arabic, Persian, and Greek manuscripts, of which he well knew the value, as he was a thorough master of these languages. He also collected for Archbishop Laud many oriental gems and coins. He made a more accurate survey of the pyramids of Egypt than any traveller who had preceded him, and afterwards digested his observations in a work on that subject. On his return from the East, he visited a second time several parts of Italy; and during his stay at Rome instituted inquiries into the ancient weights and measures. Soon after his return he was appointed to the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford, but was deprived of his Gresham professorship, the duties of which he had wholly neglected. In 1648 he lost his fellowship as well as his chair on account of his adherence to the royalist party. But his private fortune more than sufficed for all his wants till his death in 1652. Besides his papers in the Philosophical Transactions, the works of Greaves printed separately are, Pyramidographia, or a description of the Pyramids in Egypt, London, 1646, in 8vo; A Discourse of the Roman Foot and Denarius, ibid. 1649, in 4to; Elementa Linguae Persicae, ibid. 1649, in 4to; Epochae celebriores Astronomis, Historicis, Chronologis Chataiorum, Syro-Gracorum, Arabum, Persarum, &c. usitatae, ex traditione Ulug Beig, Arab. et Lat. London, 1650, in 4to; Chorasmiae et Maecarnabrac, hoc est, Regionum extra fluvium Oxum, descriptio, ibid. 1650; Astronomicae quadam, ex traditione Shah Cholgui Persae, una cum hypothesibus Planetarum, ibid. 1652, in 4to. In 1737 Dr Birch published the Miscellaneous Works of Greaves, in two vols. 8vo, containing some of those above mentioned, with additions, and a biographical notice of the author.
1 A claim has been put up for the churchyard of Granchester, about two miles from Cambridge, the great bell of St Mary's serving for the "curfew." But Stoke Poges is more likely to have been the spot, if any individual locality were indicated. The poet often visited the village, his aunt and mother residing there, and his aunt was interred in the churchyard of the place. Gray's epitaph on his mother is characterized not only by the tenderness with which he always regarded her memory, but by his style and cast of thought. It runs thus:—"Beside her friend and sister here sleep the remains of Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her. She died March 11, 1753, aged 72." She had lived to read the Elegy, which was perhaps an ample recompense for her maternal cares and affection. Mrs Gray's will commences in a similar touching strain:—"In the name of God, amen. This is the last will and desire of Dorothy Gray to her son Thomas Gray." [Cunningham's edit. of Johnson's Lives.] They were all in all to each other. The father's cruelty and neglect, their straitened circumstances, the sacrifices made by the mother to maintain her son at the university, her pride in the talents and conduct of that son, and the increasing gratitude and affection of the latter, nursed in his scholastic and cloistered solitude—these form an affecting but noble record in the history of genius.