The son of a schoolmaster, Thomas Maurice was educated at the Wesleyan seminary at Bristol before entering University College, Oxford

University College, Oxford

.University College , is a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England. As of 2009 the college had an estimated financial endowment of £110m...

 in 1774, aged 19 (B.A. 1778, M.A. 1808); he was chaplain to the 87th regiment (about 1784), Vicar of Wormleighton

Wormleighton

Wormleighton is a village in the county of Warwickshire, England.Although founded in the 15th century, it was abandoned after the English Civil War when the Spencer family home Wormleighton Manor was burned down in 1645. The village, however, refounded in the 19th century...

, Warwickshire

Warwickshire

Warwickshire is a landlocked non-metropolitan county in the West Midlands region of England. The county town is Warwick, although the largest town is Nuneaton. The county is famous for being the birthplace of William Shakespeare...

 (1798–1824) and Cudham

Cudham

Cudham is a village in the London Borough of Bromley in London, UK. It is located south-southeast of Charing Cross and about northwest of Sevenoaks....

, Kent (1804–24). Maurice was a noted oriental scholar and historian, and assistant-keeper of MSS at the British Museum

British Museum

The British Museum is a museum of human history and culture in London. Its collections, which number more than seven million objects, are amongst the largest and most comprehensive in the world and originate from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its...

 (1798-24).

Text records

• 1775 - The School-Boy, a Poem.
• 1777 - A Monody, sacred to the Memory of Elizabeth, Dutchess of Northumberland.
• 1778 - The Oxonian. A Poem.
• 1779 - Hinda; an Eastern Elegy.
• 1784 - Westminster Abbey: an Elegiac Poem.
• 1795 - An Elegiac and Historical Poem, sacred to the Memory and Virtues of the Honourable Sir William Jones.
• 1806 - Verses, being a Apology for the Errors and Eccentricities of Genius.

Publications

• The school-boy, a poem. In imitation of Mr. Phillips's Splendid Shilling. 1775.
• Hagley. A descriptive poem. 1776.
• Netherby: a poem. 1776.
• A monody addressed to the memory of Elizabeth, Duchess of Northumberland. 1777.
• The Oxonian. A poem. 1778.
• Poems and miscellaneous pieces. 1779.
• Westminster Abbey: an elegiac poem. 1784.
• Panthea; or, the Captive bride, a tragedy; founded upon a story in Xenophon. 1789.
• A letter addressed to the ... directors of the East India Company
  East India Company
  The East India Company was an early English joint-stock company that was formed initially for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but that ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and China...
  
  . 1790.
• An elegiac poem, sacred to the memory and virtues of the Honorable Sir William Jones. 1795.
• Indian antiquities. 7 vols, 1793-1800.
• History of Hindustan. 2 vols, 1795–98; 3 vols, 1820.
• The crisis, or the British Muse to the British minister and nation. 1798.
• Sanscreet fragments, or interesting fragments from the sacred books of the Brahmins. 1798.
• Grove hill: a descriptive poem; with an ode to nature. 1799.
• A dissertation on the oriental trinities. 1800.
• Poems, epistolary, lyric, and elegiacal. 1800.
• The modern history of Hindostan. 2 vols, 1802-10.
• Select poems. 1803.
• Elegy on Right Honourable
  The Right Honourable
  The Right Honourable is an honorific prefix that is traditionally applied to certain people in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Anglophone Caribbean and other Commonwealth Realms, and occasionally elsewhere...
  
   William Pitt. 1806.
• The fall of the Mogul, a tragedy. With other occasional poems. 1806.
• Richmond Hill: a descriptive and historical poem. 1807.
• Elegiac lines, sacred to the memory of Henry Hope
  Henry Hope
  Henry Hope was an Amsterdam merchant banker born in Boston, in Britain's Massachusetts Bay Colony in North America.-Early years:...
  
  . 1811.
• Brahminical fraud detected. 1812.
• Westminster Abbey
  Westminster Abbey
  The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English,...
  
  , with other occasional poems. 1813.
• Observations connected with astronomy and ancient history
  Ancient history
  Ancient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, with Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing, from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC...
  
  . 1816.
• Observations on the ruins of Babylon. 1816.
• Observations on the remains of ancient Egypt
  Ancient Egypt
  Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
  
  ian grandeur and superstition. 1818.
• Memoirs of the author of Indian antiquities, etc. 3 vols, 1819-22.
• A free translation of the Oedipus Tyrannus
  Oedipus the King
  Oedipus the King , also known by the Latin title Oedipus Rex, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BCE. It was the second of Sophocles's three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chronology, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone...
  
  of Sophocles. 1822.