Woide, Charles Godfrey

, a name worthy to be preserved on account of his valuable edition of the Alexandrine ms. of the New Testament, was a native of Holland, but of his early history we have no account. His first preferment in this country was to the preachership of the Dutch chapel-royal at St. James’s, about 1770, to which he was afterwar4s appointed reader also. At the time of his death he was reader and chaplain at the Dutch chapel in the Savoy. In 1778 he was elected a fellow of the society of antiquaries, and in that year distinguished himself by revising, through the Clarendon press, Scholtz’s “Egyptian | Grammar,” written in 1750, in 2 vols. 4to, and also La Croze’s 5* Lexicon Egyptiaco-Latinum." It had long been the wish of the learned that both these works, left in ms. by their respective authors, might be published, but they could not find a printer furnished with Egyptian types, or who would hazard the undertaking, until at last the university of Oxford, with its usual munificent spirit, determined to t>ear the expense. When the Lexicon was printing, Mr. Woide was desired to make some additions to it, but this not being proposed till more than half the work was printed, he could extend his remarks to three letters only, and to render the undertaking more useful, he added an index. It was intended to print Scholtz’s Grammar in 2 quarto yols. immediately after the Dictionary, which consists of one vol. quarto; but it being found too voluminous, Woide very properly abridged it, and has improved it by carefully examining and correcting it by means of Mss. unknown to Scholtz. The Sahidic part was entirely supplied by Dr. Woide.

In 1782 Dr. Woide was appointed an assistant librarian at the British Museum, at first in the department of natural history, but soon after in one more congenial to his studies, that of printed books. He had before obtained the degree of D. D. from the university of Copenhagen, and in 1786 was created doctor of laws at Oxford. In this year appeared his truly valuable work, the “Novum Tes^ tamentum Graecum, e codice ms. Alexandrino, qui Londini in Bibl. Musei Britannici asservatur, &c. Ex prelo Joannis Nichols, ‘Ty pis Jacksonianis,” fol. The history of this ms. thus preserved and perpetuated by an accurate fac-simile, is contained in the editor’s learned preface, which was reprinted at Leipsic in 1790,’in an octavo volume, with notes by Gottliebb Leberecht Spohn. Dr. Woide was seized with an apoplectic fit, May 6, 1790, while at sir Joseph Banks’s converzatione, of which he died next day at his apartments in the British Museum. ¹