John Ormsby (1829–1895) was a nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish translator. He is most famous for his 1885 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote de la Mancha, perhaps the most scholarly and accurate English translation of the novel up to that time. It is so precise that Samuel Putnam, who published his own English translation of the novel in 1949, faults Ormsby for duplicating Cervantes' pronouns so closely that the meaning of the sentences sometimes becomes confusing. Life He was born at Gortnor Abbey, co. Mayo, on 25 April 1829, was the eldest son of George Ormsby (died 1836), a captain in the 3rd dragoons and high sheriff of co. Mayo in 1827, and his wife Marianne, third daughter of Humphrey Jones of Mullinabro, co. Kilkenny. He was a direct descendant of the Ormsby family which migrated from Lincolnshire to co. Mayo in the reign of Elizabeth I. On the death of both parents during his childhood, he was placed under the guardianship of Denis Brown, dean of Emly. He was educated at Dr. Roman's private school at Seapoint, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated B.A. in 1843, and he won a silver medal for chemistry at the University of London in 1846. Two years later, he was admitted at the Middle Temple, but he was never called to the bar. His literary tastes were developed early, and he contributed papers of travel to Fraser's Magazine, to the Saturday Review, and to the early numbers of the Cornhill and the Pall Mall Gazette. He lived at this period in King's Bench Walk in the Temple, a 'denizen of Bohemia, but of the cultivated and scholarlike Bohemia,' and his friends often remarked that he would be an 'excellent representative of Warrington in "Pendennis."' He was extremely well read in eighteenth-century literature, and especially in Defoe, Fielding, and Boswell. He was a member of the Alpine Club almost from its inauguration in 1858. He was one of the first party to climb the Pic de Grivola in August 1859, and he contributed an amusing paper on 'The Ascent of the Grivola' to the second volume of the second series of Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, by members of the Alpine Club (1862). In 1864, he published Autumn Rambles in North Africa, travel sketches from La Grande Kabylie and Tunis during 1863–4, originally contributed for the most part to Fraser, with illustrations by