Walter Alexander Raleigh

Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) was an English scholar, critic, and essayist who became the first Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1904, after earlier chairs at Liverpool and Glasgow. He helped establish English as a serious academic discipline and wrote widely read critical studies of Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Known for his lucid, conversational prose, he was knighted in 1911.