TrenchJustinMartyr
Richard Chenevix Trench
This poem is ostensibly a story about Justin Martyr's mysterious conversation near the seashore with an old man he'd never seen before and never saw again, as he related it in the book Dialogue with Trypho. However, since the general concerns of the character of Justin in this poem are not those in Justin's book, this is probably an autobiographical poem im disguise. Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) was an Anglican clergyman who ended up as archbishop of Dublin. Meanwhile, his philological interests and lectures led him to urge the making of a dictionary which included all of a word's meanings through time, an idea which became the project of the Oxford English Dictionary.