(c.1750 - 97), Irish clergyman; Trin. Dublin 1763; archdeacon of Killala 1788.
1778 - 9 Rome (1 Oct. 1778), Naples (by 3 Feb. 1779)
'A very amiable good-natured man' who, said Horace Walpole, 'has a good heart and much simplicity',1 Sherlock published Letters from an English Traveller [1780], of which few are dated. He was in Switzerland, Holland Germany and Austria between April 1776 and March 1778 before reaching Rome on 1 October 1778. On 3 February 1779 he was in Naples, and in July he was passing through Berlin on his way to Potsdam.
His Letters were first published in French at Geneva in 1779, to be translated into English on his return. A second series of Nouvelles Lettres, 'written originally in French by the Rev. Martin Sherlock, A.M., Chaplain to the Right Honorable the Earl of Bristol', was published in Paris and London in 1780, with an English translation (New Letters) in 1781. The letters, abounding with generalisation and quotation, are superficial and spirited: 'I always had self-love enough, and since I am printed, I perceive I have much more' (Letters, 133). 'Mediocrity is rare here [in Italy]; everything is in extremes', Sherlock reflected; 'no citizens; an excessive luxury amongst individuals; and the people in the most abject misery. It is the same in regard to religion', and in national character - 'the Italian, in general, is exceedingly good, or wicked to a degree' (Letters, 46 - 7). One of his great pleasures was to have 'his Horace in one pocket, and his Virgil in the other, and to look at a thousand objects which have been painted by these masters' (New Letters, 64). He commended the view from the top of Vesuvius as the 'most perfect union of the sublime and the beautiful in nature', the same union in art being best seen in the Apollo Belvedere; it was in the Belvedere that the superiority of the Greeks to 'all the nations of the world' was most evident (Letters, 77 - 80).
In the course of his tour Sherlock also produced a book in Italian on literary criticism, Consiglio ad un Giovane Poeta (Naples n.d.; 2nd ed. Rome 1780); his fluency in languages seemed admirable but, wrote Walpole, his Italian was 'ten times worse than his French, and more bald'.2 Such inadequacies seem not to have deterred Sherlock. 'I sought glory, and I obtained it. My Letters had as much success, on the continent, as any prose-work of the same size published within the century, which I attribute principally to the truth and simplicity with which they were written' (New Letters, xi).
1. Wal.Corr., 2:301. 2. Ibid., 33:240.