Le Grice, Charles Valentine (1799-1806)

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Venn: Adm. sizar (age 19) at TRINITY, June 16, 1792. [Eldest] s. of [the Rev.] Charles (above), of Bury St Edmunds [and Sophia Ann]. [B. Feb. 14, 1773.] School, Christ's Hospital, London. ' Matric. Michs. 1792; Scholar, 1795; B.A. 1796; M.A. 1805. At school he was a class-fellow of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a close friend of Charles Lamb, whose home he frequented in school holidays. Tutor to William John Godolphin Nicholls, of Trereife, near Penzance. Ord. deacon (Norwich) Sept. 22, [p.143] 1799; priest, 1800. P.C. and Lecturer of St Mary's, Penzance, and P.C. of Madron, 1806-31. Married, 1799, his pupil's mother, Mary, dau. of William Ustick, of Botallack, and widow of John [William (L.G.)] Nicholls, of Trereife, and had issue. Inherited the property of Trereife, on his wife's death 1821 (her son, William J. G. Nicholls, having died in 1815, of ‘ossification of the body’). Author, miscellaneous verse and prose, and College Reminiscences of Coleridge. ‘A wag, like his brother, but more staid. He went into the Church, as he ought to do, and married a rich widow’ (Leigh Hunt, Autobiography). Lamb, in his essay on Christ's Hospital, refers to the ‘wit combats between Coleridge and Le Grice,’ comparing Coleridge to the Spanish galleon and Le Grice to an English man-of-war. Died Dec. 24, 1858, at Trereife. Buried at Madron. Brother of Samuel (1794); father of the next. (Christ's Hospital Exhibitioners; St John's Coll. Adm., III. 1682 (under his father); Boase, Biblio. Cornub., 311; Burke, L.G.; D.N.B.; Crockford; Clergy List.)

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