William Barnes (22 February 1801 – 7 October 1886) was an English polymath, writer, poet, philologist, priest, mathematician, engraving artist and inventor. He wrote over 800 poems, some in Dorset dialect, and much other work, including a comprehensive English grammar quoting from more than 70 different languages. A linguistic purist, Barnes strongly advocated against borrowing foreign words into English, and instead supported the use and proliferation of "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech". Life and work Barnes was born in the parish of Bagber, Dorset, to John Barnes, a tenant-farmer in the Vale of Blackmore. The younger Barnes's formal education finished when he was 13 years old. Between 1818 and 1823 he worked in Dorchester, the county town, as a solicitor's clerk, then moved to Mere in neighbouring Wiltshire and opened a school. While he was there he began writing poetry in the Dorset dialect, as well as studying several languages—Italian, Persian, German and French, in addition to Greek and Latin—playing musical instruments (violin, piano, and flute) and practicing wood-engraving. He married Julia Miles, the daughter of an exciseman from Dorchester, in 1827. In 1835 he moved back to the county town, where again he ran a school at first located on Durngate Street and subsequently on South Street. By a further move, within South Street, the school became a neighbor of an architect's practice in which Thomas Hardy was an apprentice. The architect John Hicks was interested in literature and the classics, and when disputes about grammar occurred in the practice, Hardy visited Barnes for authoritative opinions. Barnes's other literary friends included Lord Tennyson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was a teetotaller and vegetarian. Barnes was ordained into the Church of England in 1847, taking a BD degree from St John's College, Cambridge, in 1851. He served curacies at Whitcombe Church in Whitcombe, Dorset, from 1847 to 1852, and again from 1862. He became rector of St Peter's Church, Winterborne Came, with Winterborne Farringdon, Dorset, from 1862 to his death. Shortly before his death, he was visited at Old Came Rectory by Thomas Hardy and Edmund Gosse; in a letter, Gosse wrote that Barnes was "dying as picturesquely as he lived": Barnes first contributed the Dorset dialect poems for which he is best known to periodicals, including Macmillan's Magazine; a collection in book form Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, was published in 1844. A second collection Hwomely Rhymes