Spedding, James, editor of Bacon, born at Mirehouse, near Keswick, son of a Cumberland squire; scholar and honorary Fellow of Cambridge; became in 1847 Under-Secretary of State with £2000 a year; devoted his life to the study of Bacon, the fruit of which the “Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon, including all his Occasional Works, newly selected and set forth with a Commentary, Biographical and Historical,” in 7 vols.; a truly noble man, and much esteemed by his contemporaries in literature (1808‒1881).
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Speculative, The * Speke, John Banning