# Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Stokes, Whitley

​STOKES, WHITLEY (1830–1909), Celtic scholar, eldest son of William Stokes, M.D. [q. v.], by his wife Mary Black, was born in Dublin on 28 Feb. 1830. His family tree does not contain a single native Irish name. He entered St. Columba's College at Rathfarnham, co. Dublin, on 8 Oct. 1845, and left on 16 Dec. in the same year. Denis Coffey, a Munster man, was the Irish teacher there, and his 'Primer of the Irish Language,' which had just appeared, was probably the first Irish book placed in the hands of Stokes. The next was undoubtedly the 'Grammar of the Irish Language' of John O'Donovan, published in 1845 at the expense of St. Columba's College. His first guide to the vocabulary of Irish was the Irish dictionary of Edward O'Reilly, as is shown by Stokes's interleaved, annotated, and marked copy of the book. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1847, and graduated B.A. in 1851. In his father's house he became acquainted with George Petrie [q. v.], deep in Irish architecture and music, with John O'Donovan [q. v.], the best Irish scholar of the time and the greatest of all Irish topographers, and with Eugene O'Curry [q. v.], the most accomplished modern representative of the ancient Irish scribes. Stokes thus had the opportunity of laying a broad foundation for every part of Irish learning. He elected early to devote himself to the study of the words and forms of the Irish language, and regarded Irish literature as chiefly interesting in so far as it furnished material for comparative philology. Rudolf Thomas Siegfried, a philologist from Tübingen, first assistant librarian of Trinity College and afterwards professor there of Sanscrit and comparative philology, a man of much learning and great enthusiasm, became his friend and influenced his studies, and the vast field for philological research opened by the publication of the 'Grammatica Celtica' of John Caspar Zeuss in 1853 decided the direction of the studies which Stokes pursued with unremitting industry till death. He took some lessons in Irish from John O'Donovan, but never acquired its pronunciation, and used always to read Irish exactly as English schoolboys once read Latin, according to the English powers of the letters, and he never sounded the 'r,' nor had he any idea of quantity.
Stokes became a student of the Liner Temple on 9 Oct. 1851, and was called to the bar on 17 Nov. 1855. He was a pupil of Cayley, Cairns, and Chitty, and practised in London for six years till 1862, when he went to Madras and afterwards to Calcutta. In India he formed a friendship with Sir Henry Sumner Maine [q. v.], and partly through his influence, after being secretary to the governor-general's legislative council, was made secretary to the legislative department in 1865, and was from 1877 to 1882 law member of the council of the governor-general. In 1879 he was appointed president of the Indian law commission. He had published in London 'A Treatise on the Liens of Legal Practitioners' in 1860, and one on 'Powers of Attorney' in 1861. He drafted many Indian consolidation acts and the bulk of the codes of procedure, and published 'Hindu Law Books' at Madras in 1865, the Anglo-Indian codes (two volumes) in 1887–8, with supplements 1889-91, and three other books ​on the statutes of India. He was made C.S.I, in 1877 and C.I.E. in 1879. In 1882 he left India, and for the rest of his life resided for a time in Oxford and at Camberley in Surrey, but chiefly in Kensington.
Meanwhile Stokes continued his Irish studies without intermission alike in England and in India. In 1859 he published as a paper in the 'Transactions of the Philological Society of London,' 'Irish Glosses from a MS. in Trinity College, Dublin.' His first book was 'A Mediæval Tract on Latin Declension, with Examples explained in Latin and the Lorica of Gildas, with the Gloss thereon and Glosses from the Book of Armagh'; it was printed in 1860 in Dublin by the Irish Archæological and Celtic Society, and he received for it the gold medal of the Royal Irish Academy. In 1862 he published in London three Irish glossaries. The first was that of Cormac MacCuillenain, the second that of Domnall O'Dubhdhaboirenn, written in 1569, and the third that occurring in the 'Calendar of Oengus Cele Dé.' These are accompanied by a long introduction and verbal indexes, but are not translated. In 1868 Stokes published at Calcutta an edition of John O'Donovan's manuscript translation of Cormac's glossary, with notes and sixteen separate verbal indexes, as well as three of matters, authors, and persons. Throughout his writings he retained the practice of having many indexes to each book. He published 'Goidelica,' a collection of Old and Early-middle Irish glosses, at Calcutta in 1866, (2nd edit. London, 1872), as well as many smaller collections of glosses, Irish, Welsh, and Breton, and in 1901 and 1903, with John Strachan [q.v. Suppl. II], a 'Thesaurus Palæohibernicus ' of more than twelve hundred pages of old Irish glosses from manuscripts anterior to the eleventh century. The Italian government had spent large sums in the publication of the Milan glosses and thought part of the work an unjust invasion of their property, and a reflection upon it. An apologetic statement was in consequence inserted in the second volume by the editors. The book rendered the mass of Old Irish glosses on the Continent and in Ireland easily accessible for the first time. All this glossarial study rendered Stokes in the highest degree competent to write the 'Urkeltischer Sprachschatz' in 1894, with Professor Bezzenberger. He also prepared many papers on grammatical subjects, of which one of the chief is an elaborate investigation of 'Celtic Declension,' issued by the Philological Society in 1885–6. He published texts and translations with notes, and generally with glossaries, of a great many pieces of Irish literature, of which the earliest was the 'Fis Adamnain,' the account of the journey of Adamnan, grandson of Tinne, to Paradise and to Hell, from a manuscript of 1106. This was printed at Simla in 1870. At Calcutta in 1877 he published Irish lives of Patrick, Brigit, and Columba from a fifteenth-century manuscript, and at the same place in 1882 the 'Togail Troi,' a tale of the destruction of Troy in part based on Dares Phrygius. In 1890 he published at Oxford, in the 'Anecdota Oxoniensia,' 'Lives of Saints from the Book of Lismore,' a manuscript of about 1450. The 'Felire' of Angus, a sort of metrical calendar of saints, he first edited in 1871, in the publications of the Royal Irish Academy, and again from ten manuscripts in 1905, in a volume of the Henry Bradshaw Society. The same society published in 1895 his edition of the 'Felire' of O'Gorman, another metrical calendar. He edited in the Rolls series in 1887, 'The Tripartite Life of St. Patrick,' in two volumes. Besides all these and many more Irish works he edited and translated the Cornish mystery, 'Gwreansan Bys' (Creation of the World), in 1864, 'The Life of St. Meriasek' in 1872, and a volume of 'Middle Breton Hours' in 1876 (Calcutta). Another part of his writings consists of controversial attacks, generally on the interpretation of texts, on O'Beirne Crowe, O'Curry, Sullivan, Prof. Robert Atkinson [q. v. Suppl. II], S. H. O' Grady, and others. Nemesis is always on the watch in such controversies, and Stokes himself fell into many errors of the kind he censured in others. No man could have edited so many difficult texts for the first time without making some mistakes. Stokes often came to perceive his own, and altered them quietly in a fresh edition. The severity of his studies sometimes broke down his health, and produced conditions of extreme irritability or of depression, which explain the violence of his language. His last Irish work was an edition of the Irish prose version of Luean's 'Pharsalia' known as 'Cath Catharda,' which Professor Ernst Windisch of Leipzig printed after his death. Windisch and Stokes together brought out a series of 'Irische Texte,' at Leipzig, 1884–1909, of which this was the last.
Stokes died at 15 Grenville Place,