He was educated at Reading school under Richard Valpy and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was elected fellow. He was appointed regius professor of Greek in 1823, and died in Cambridge on the 24th of September 1825. He was an intimate friend of Porson, whom he took as his model in textual criticism, although he showed less caution in conjectural emendation. After Porson's death (1808) Dobree was commissioned with Monk and Blomfield to edit his literary remains, which had been bequeathed to Trinity College.
Illness and a subsequent journey to Spain delayed the work until 1820, when Dobree brought out the Plutus of Aristophanes (with his own and Porson's notes) and all Porson's Aristophanica. Two years later he published the Lexicon of Photius from Porson's transcript of the Gale manuscript in Trinity College library, to which he appended a Lexicon rhetoricum, from the margin of a Cambridge manuscript of Harpocration.
James Scholefield, his successor in the Greek professorship, brought out selections from his notes (Adversaria, 1831-1833) on Greek and Latin authors (especially the orators), and a reprint of the Lexicon rhetoricum, together with notes on inscriptions (1834-1835).
An appreciative estimate of Dobree as a scholar will be found in J Bake's Scholica hypomnemata, ii. (1839) and in the Philological Museum, i. (1832) by JC Hare.
This entry was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.