RARE "Oxford Professor of Poetry" John McKail Hand Written Note For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Oxford Professor of Poetry" John McKail Hand Written Note Dated 1909.

ES-2929

John

William Mackail OM (26

August 1859 – 13 December 1945) was a Scottish academic of Oxford University and reformer of the British education

system. He is most often remembered as a scholar of Virgil or as the official biographer of the socialist

artist William Morris, of whom he

was a friend. Mackail was Oxford Professor of Poetry from

1906 to 1911, and President of the British Academy from 1932 to 1936. Mackail was born

in Ascog on Bute, the second child and only son of the Rev. John Mackail,

of the Free Church, and Louisa Irving, who was the youngest daughter of Aglionby Ross Carson FRSE,

who was the rector of Edinburgh High School. He

was educated at Ayr Academy; at Edinburgh University, from

1874 to 1877; and at Balliol College, Oxford,

as Warner Exhibitioner, from 1877. At Oxford, he took first classes in

classical moderations (1879) and literae humaniores ('Greats') in 1881, and he

also obtained the Hertford (1880), Ireland (1880), Newdigate (1881), Craven

(1882) and Derby (1884) Prizes. He was elected to a Balliol fellowship in 1882.

At Oxford, Mackail contributed, alongside Cecil Spring Rice, to the composition of a famous sardonic

doggerel about George Nathaniel Curzon,

later Lord Curzon, their contemporary at Balliol, that was published in The Balliol Masque. In

1884, Mackail accepted a post in the Education Department of the Privy Council

(later the Board of Education), of which he became Assistant Secretary in 1903.

In this position, made an important contribution to the system of secondary

education established by the 1902 Education Act, and to the organisation of a

system of voluntary inspection for the public schools. He retired from office

in 1919. He

was the official biographer of the socialist artist William Morris, of whom he was a close friend. He also

published works on Virgil; and Jesus.

He was Oxford Professor of Poetry (1906–11),

and President of the British Academy (1932–36). He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1935.