him at New College. This caused much amusement at the porters' lodge, as if he had asked for the Shah of Persia: "Oh no, sir. Lord David? Oh, you'd have to get up very early in the morning to get hold of him. Oh dear, oh dear. Lord David in college, well I never did." During his academic career Cecil published studies of Hardy, Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, Dorothy Osborne and Walter Pater. As well as his literary studies he also published a two-volume historical biography of Lord Melbourne (to whom he was distantly related) and appreciations of visual artists – Augustus John, Max Beerbohm, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones. In retirement he published further literary and biographic studies of Walter de la Mare, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb and Desmond MacCarthy, as well as a history of his own family, The Cecils of Hatfield House and an account of Some Dorset Country Houses. His anthology of writers who had given him special pleasure, Library Looking Glass, appeared in 1975. Family and personal life In 1932 Cecil married Rachel MacCarthy, daughter of the literary journalist Sir Desmond MacCarthy. They had three children, including actor Jonathan Cecil. Publications The Stricken Deer or The Life of Cowper (1929) [on the poet William Cowper; this won the 1929 James Tait Black Memorial Prize] Sir Walter Scott: The Raven Miscellany (1933) Early Victorian Novelists : essays in revaluation (1934) Jane Austen (1936) The Young Melbourne and the Story of his Marriage with Caroline Lamb (1939; reprinted 1948 and 1954) The English Poets (1941) The Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1941) [editor] Men of the R.A.F. (1942) [with Sir William Rothenstein] Hardy the Novelist: an Essay in Criticism (1942) [Clark Lectures] Antony and Cleopatra, the fourth W. P. Ker memorial lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow, 4 May 1943 (1944) Poetry of Thomas Gray (1945) [Warton Lecture] Two Quiet Lives (1948) [on Dorothy Osborne and Thomas Gray] Poets & Story-tellers (1949) [essays] Reading as One of the Fine Arts (1949) inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 28 May 1949 Lord M, or the Later Life of Lord Melbourne (1954) Walter Pater--the Scholar Artist (1955) Rede Lecture Augustus John: Fifty-two Drawings (1957) The Fine Art of Reading and Other Literary Studies (1957) Modern Verse in English 1900-1950 (1958) [editor with Allen Tate] Max (1964) [biography of Max Beerbohm] Visionary and Dreamer : Two poetic