James Dominick Ambrose Aylward › Texts

Aylward, James Ambrose, born in 1813, at Leeds, and educated at Hinckley, the Dominican Priory of St. Peter, to which a secular college was attached. Particulars touching the stages of his monastic life may be found in the Obituary Notices of the Friar-Preachers, or Dominicans, of the English Province from the year of our Lord 1650. He was ordained in 1836, and assisted in the school, taking the higher classical studies, in 1842. He became head of the school, and continued so till it was discontinued in 1852. At Woodchester he was made successively Lector of Philosophy and Theology and Prior. He died at Hinckley, and was buried in the cloister-yard of Woodchester. His sacred poems have become his principal monument, and of these he contributed very many to the first three volumes of the Catholic Weekly Instructor and other periodicals. His essay on the Mystical Element in Religion, and on Ancient and Modern Spiritism, was not published till 1874. Referring to him, and to his manuscript translation of Latin hymns, a large number of which are incorporated by Mr. O. Shipley in Annus Sanctus, 1884, Mr. Shipley says: “The second collection of manuscripts came from the pen of the late Very Rev. Father Aylward, of the Order of Preachers, a cultured and talented priest of varied powers and gifts, whose memory is held dear by all who knew and were influenced by him. He went to his reward in the year 1872, after nearly forty years' profession as a Dominican, and was buried in the picturesque cloistral-cemetery of Woodchester, of which model and peaceful religious house he was the first Prior."
[J. C. Earle, A.B.]

-- John Julian, Dictionary of Hymnology (1907)