After frequent intermissions, his distemper, in 1793, became more severe than ever. On the 11th of June he breathed his last, at Grange-House, his country-seat, near Edinburgh.

The close and vigorous application which, through a long life, enabled Dr. Robertson's great intellectual powers to leave monuments of delight and instruction to the remotest posterity, did not prevent him from enjoying the pleasures of social intercourse. He was very happy in his own family, had great pleasure in parties of friends and intimates, and not unfrequently joined in larger and more mixed companies. He was no enemy to the convivial meetings which Scottish hospitality so often produces in the good town of Edinburgh. In company he was extremely entertaining; he had a great fund of agreeable anecdote, facetious humour, and an excellent collection of good stories, which he told with much pleasantry and point. Although, as a discriminating observer and able painter, he could bring forward very strong and poignant satire when he chose; yet he was far from being habitually satirical. In his common conversation you must see that he was a very acute, discerning, and facetious man: you might discover that he was a wise man: but he did not exhibit his wisdom for the mere ostentatious display of superiority. In his manners he was affable, pleasing, and unassuming in the various relations of life, exemplary and estimable.

Dr. Robertson was rather under the middle size, well proportioned, and strongly limbed. His countenance, though not handsome, indicated amiableness of disposition, and expressed the force of his understanding. His dark eyes were uncommonly penetrating.

The Doctor left three sons and two daughters. The eldest son is Procurator for the Church of Scotland, and an Advocate. The other two are officers in the army; and one of them distinguished himself under Lord Cornwallis, in such a manner as to command the warmest praise from that illustrious General.

THE LIFE

OF

DR. SAMUEL HORSLEY,

LORD BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.

HAVING attempted a sketch of the life of a deceased character of

the highest eminence in the literary world, we shall proceed to a living character of very great respectability, both as a man of learning and of talents.

Samuel Horsley is the eldest of three sons of the Rev. Mr. Horsley, formerly Minister of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. The paternal grand-father of the Bishop was a Dissenting Minister; but he afterwards thought proper to be a member of our church. His maternal grand-father was Mr. William Hamilton, Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh,* a gentleman of talents and learning not unworthy of the grand-father of Dr. Horsley. Mr. Hamilton's sound judgment, professional precepts, lessons, and example, were of great efficacy in expelling the old puritanical cant that had descended from the Scotch Covenanters; as his grand-son has in the present age so powerfully combated sectarian laxity. Mr. Horsley's uncle, Dr. Robert Hamilton, came to fill his father's chair, though not as his immediate successor. Dr. Hamilton, late Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh, was also a man of a sound and acute mind, very deeply skilled in theology, logic, moral philosphy, and classical literature, and was indeed a general scholar.

By both father and mother, Dr. Horsley was allied to the clerical profession according to the different establishments of North and South Britain; and by the mother's to deep knowledge of divinity and its subsidiary studies.

Mr. Horsley was born in 1737. He was educated at Westminster School, and thence removed to Cambridge University. It is justly and ably observed in Mr. Newte's Tour, that education at one of the seminaries sanctioned by public institution has a great tendency

This was the Mr. Hamilton before whom the celebrated James Thomson, then intended for the church, delivered a Paraphrase on one of the Psalms. His composition had so much of poetical force and fire, that Mr. Hamilton advised him to restrain the exuberance of his genius, if he wished to persist in studying divinity. The expression which Mr. Hamilton principally pitched upon as wild and extravagant was his calling thunder and lightning the frolics of the Almighty.'

to nourish in the hearts of youth an attachment to their king and country. 'Take away,' says he, these memorials of antiquity, these noble and royal testimonies of respect to sanctity of life and proficiency in learning, remove every sensible object by which sentiments of early friendship, loyalty, and patriotism are kindled and inflammed in young minds, and disperse our young gentlemen in other countries for their education, or even in separate little academies and schools in our own, and you weaken one of the greatest pillars by which the constitution and spirit of England is supported and perpetuated.'

The first scene of young Horsley's classical studies may in some degree account for the extent of his early attainments and the soundness of his principles. He was educated UNDER REAL SCHOLARS, AND MEN WELL AFFECTED TO THE CHURCH AND STATE. OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS are nurseries of learning, patriotism, and loyalty; which, we are afraid, is by no means the case with some of the private academies.

At Cambridge Mr. Horsley applied himself chiefly to the study of Mathematics. Not satisfied with examining the works of the most able and profound moderns, he went back to the ancients, and perfectly mastered their most complex and difficult reasonings.

After he had taken his degree of Master of Arts, he was prevailed upon to go to Oxford to undertake the private tuition of the present Earl of Aylesford. From that University he received a degree of Doctor of Laws; and in 1769 printed at the Clarendon Press his edition of the Inclinations of Appollonius. He now conceived the design of publishing a complete edition of the works of Sir Isaac Newton for which purpose he began to collect materials. Dr. Horsley coming from college to London, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Having settled in the capital, he was patronized by Bishop Lowth.

In 1774 he was presented by the Bishop to the rectories of St. Mary, Newington, and Albury, both in the county of Surry. In the coure of the same year he married a Miss Botnam. In 1776 he published proposals for a complete and elegant edition of the works of Newton. The edition appeared in 1779, in five volumes quarto; dedicated to the King, in Latin. It was hoped that a life of our philosopher would have appeared. A history of his mind, written by the ability and science of Dr. Horsley, would have been a most estimable addition to the work.

In 1778, Doctors Priestley and Price were inculcating the doctrines of Materialism and Necessity. Dr. Horsley preached a sermon in

St. Paul's Cathedral, and with much ability supported the doctrine of Providence and Free will, and overturned a Necessarian hypothesis. His talents procured him higher promotion. He was appointed Archdeacon of St. Alban's by Bishop Lowth, who, in 1782, presented him to the valuable living of South Weald, in Essex.

Priestley, in 1783, published his work intended to overthrow doctrines respecting the divinity of our Saviour. The attack, conducted with an ingenuity which with superficial thinkers passed for able reasoning, and with a parade of learning which with superficial scholars passed for real knowledge, called forward Dr. Horsley to defend the doctrines of Christianity. The learning of our Divine shewed Priestley's heresy to be a mere repetition of the Socinianism of former times. The classical erudition of a man educated in a seminary, in which the masters know what they undertake to teach, shewed the inaccuracy of Priestley in the Greek tongue. The ability of this champion of our religion combated and overthrew the abettor of heresy.

The style of Dr. Horsley is, like his arguments, strong; he writes with the bold confidence of a defender of momentous truths.

Priestley answered. Dr. Horsley replied, and easily and completely overturned his objections. The powerful intellect of the Archdeacon of St. Alban's had derived great improvement from his mathematical studies. Mathematical, habits afforded an important assistance to the Defender of our Church, as they have since done to the Defender and Preserver of our State.

To Priestley's reply, as it contained no new arguments, the Doctor did not misemploy his time by honouring him with farther notice. In 1789 he collected his Tracts on this controversy, and, together with his sermon on the Incarnation of Christ, preached at his church at Newington, Christmas Day, 1785, were published, in 1789, in an octavo volume. The concluding chapter on the general spirit of Dr. Priestley's controversial writings exhibits a penetration and compréhension, a power of reasoning and a perception of tendency, which would alone have stamped the character of Dr. Horsley as one of the first men of his times. ▸

Having overturned Priestley's reasonings against Christianity, he

Priestley was educated by some Dissenting academician, which may, perhaps, partly account for his being by no means so accurate, either in knowledge or habits of reasoning, as with much weaker talents than he possessed, he might have been, from a regular and complete instruction under men competent to the

task.

4

shews his motives to be the desire of overturning the ecclesiastical With polity, by which Christianity is, in this country, upheld. these motives he did not charge Priestley on grounds of mere probability, or constructive evidence, but upon the most direct and positive testimony, in the explicit, repeated, open declarations of Priestley himself. The motives, (says Dr. Horsley, with a most candid liberality) by which one man is impelled, are, for the most part, so imperfectly known to any other, that it seems to me cruel to suppose, that the evil, which appears in men's actions, is always answered by an equal malignity in their minds. I have ever, therefore, held it dangerous and uncharitable to reason from the actions of men to their principles; and, from my youth up, have been averse to censorious judgment. But when men declare their motives and their principles, IT WERE FOLLY TO AFFECT TO JUDGE THEM MORE FAVOURABLY THAN THEY JUDGE THEMSELVES. I shall, therefore, not hesitate to say, that after a denial of our Lord's divinity, his pre-existence, and the virtue of his atonement; after a denial, at last, of our Lord's plenary inspiration; after a declaration of implacable enmity to the constitution under which he lives; under which he enjoys the licence of saying what he lists, in a degree in which it never was enjoyed by the first citizens of the freest democracies; the goodness of his Christianity, and his merit as a subject, are topics upon which it may be indiscreet for the encomiast of Dr. Priestley to enlarge."*

While Horsley was contending with a very able assailant of the Christian church, he had a contest in the school of Philosophy with a much less formidable opponent. In the Royal Society trifling subjects had begun to attract a degree of attention, which, in the opinion of Horsley, and other men of ability and science, ought to have been devoted to philosophical investigation and discussion. The Doctor with great ease appreciated the value of researches that did not exceed mere nomenclature, and had no tendency to establish general truth, or produce particular benefit; and with equal ease estimated the nature and compass of talents that could be so employed.

See Controversy with Dr. Priestley, page 400.

The value of such attainments is exhibited, with the most poignant and forcible satire, in Dr. William Thomson's Man of the Moon. There we find a most industrious and celebrated collector of nick-nacks employed in measuring the scales of large fishes; the sole object being the measurement of the said scales, the virtuoso not having the smallest conception of any speculative truths or practical use that could result from his labours.