Meleager in Chalmers

Alexander Chalmers was the editor-dogsbody-wunderkind of a durable work of reference, the General Biogaphical Dictionary of 1812. Its entry for Meleager is worth considering in relation to the 1924 translation in which Frederick Wright divided the poet's life between bi-curious youth and heterosexual maturity. I wrote in my blog post that Wright must have got the idea out of the introduction to Robert Bland's translation of 1806, but now I bet he went no further than the Biographical Dictionary:

... Meleager formed two collections of Greek verses, under the name of Anthologia; one, it is melancholy to say, was entirely dedicated to that odious passion of the Greeks, which among us it is a shame even to mention. To this infamous collection was prefixed a poem, still extant, in which tbe youths whose beauty was celebrated, are described as flowers. A poet named Strato, increased this collection, and prefixed to it his own name: but Agathias and Planudes, to their honour, rejected this part altogether, and formed their collections from the second Anthologia of Meleager, which consisted of compositions entirely miscellaneous. On this the present collections of Greek epigrams are founded. The poems of Meleager in Brunck's edition, amount to 129, tbe greater part of which are epigrams. They display great elegance of genius, and do as much honour to the collection, as most of those which it contains. Lord Chesterfield's indiscriminate censure of the Greek epigrams, must be the result of mere ignorance, since many of them are of the highest elegance. He had seen, probably, a few of the worst, and knew nothing of the rest. Of the epigrams of Meleager, many are truly elegant, but those numbered, in Brunck's Analecta, 50, 51, 52, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 109, 111, 112, and several others, have beauty enough to rescue the whole collection from the unjust censure of the witty, but not learned earl.

I coud write a short book about everything that is wrong with this paragraph of the Chalmers entry alone -- 'mere ignorance' is a pot calling a kettle black -- but the point to note is that Bland's and Wright's two-phase Meleager is packaged here in bestselling form.

Chalmers' Dictionary has its own Wikipedia page, learnedly noting that its editor expanded upon an older dictionary of the previous century, the New and General Biographical Dictionary. This ran to three editions: 1761, 1784, 1798-1810. A web search quickly finds that juvenile Meleager's 'odious passion of the Greeks' was already there in 1798, so it is pre-Chalmers (who in any case only got as far as 'D' before dying) and pre-Bland as well (unless he was the entry's author?).

The next thing to check is, just how old is this entry? Was it there in 1784, and even in 1761? My hunch is no: the heart of the Dictionary in its various iterations was Anglocentric, and nothing turns up online. But: absence of evidence, etc. This will need a big library. As to who composed the entry, and on what authority, I imagine we will never know for sure. Bland is my stopgap guess, but where did he get the notion?