nina * carried exaggeration to the utmost when he declared that Blacklock would seem a fable to posterity as he had been a prodigy to his contemporaries. It is no doubt curious that his memory should have retained so many forms of expression for things which he had never seen; but those who have conversed with intelligent persons who have been blind from their infancy must have often remarked in them a familiarity of language respecting the objects of vision which, though not easy to be accounted for, will be found sufficiently common to make the rhymes of Blacklock appear far short of marvellous. Blacklock, on more than one occasion, betrays something like marks of blindness.†

WILLIAM HAYWARD ROBERTS.

[Born, 1745. Died, 1791.]

He was educated at Eton, and from thence was elected to King's College, Cambridge, where he took the degree of master of arts, and of doctor in divinity. From being an under master at Eton he finally rose to be provost of the college, in the year 1781. He was also chaplain to the King, and rector of Farnham Royal, in Buckinghamshire. In 1771 he published, in three parts, A Poetical Essay on the Attributes and Providence of the Deity ;' two years afterwards, A Poetical Epistle to Christopher Anstey,' on the English poets, chiefly those who had written in blank verse; and in 1774 his poem of 'Judah Restored,' a work of no common merit.‡

6

* In his Discorso della Litteratura.'

+ [Blacklock's poetry sleeps secure in undisturbed mediocrity, and Blacklock himself is best remembered from Johnson's reverential look and the influence a letter of his had upon the fate and fortunes of Burns.]

[Dr. Roberts's Judah Restored' was one of the first books that I ever possessed. It was given me by a lady whom I must ever gratefully remember as the kindest friend of my boyhood. I read it often then, and can still recur to it with satisfaction; and perhaps I owe something to the plain dignity of its style, which is suited to the subject, and everywhere bears the stamp of good sense and careful erudition. To acknowledge obligations of this kind is both a pleasure and a duty.-Southey, Life of Cowper, iii. 32. The Editor possesses Southey's copy of the Judah,' with the following inscription in it in the poet's neat handwriting:-" Robert Southey: given me by Mrs. Dolignon, 1784.]

SIR WILLIAM JONES.

[Born, 1746. Died, 1794.]

SIR WILLIAM JONES is not a great poet; but his name recalls such associations of worth, intellect, and accomplishments, that, if these sketches were not necessarily and designedly only miniatures of biography, I should feel it a sort of sacrilege to consign to scanty and inadequate bounds the life of a scholar who, in feeding the lamp of knowledge, may be truly said to have prematurely exhausted the lamp of life.

He was born in London. His father, who it is said could trace his descent from the ancient princes of North Wales, and who, like his son, was no discredit to his lineage, was so eminent a mathematician as to be distinguished by the esteem of Newton and Halley. His first employment had been that of a schoolmaster on board a man-of-war; and in that situation he attracted the notice and friendship of Lord Anson. An anecdote is told of him, that at the siege of Vigo he was one of the party who had the liberty of pillaging the captured town. With no very rapacious views, he selected a bookseller's shop for his share; but, finding no book worth taking away, he carried off a pair of scissors, which he used to show his friends, as a trophy of his military success. On his return to England he established himself as a teacher of mathematics, and published several scientific works, which were remarkable for their neatness of illustration and brevity of style. By his labours as a teacher he acquired a small fortune, but lost it through the failure of a banker. His friend, Lord Macclesfield, however, in some degree indemnified him for the loss, by procuring for him a sinecure place under government. Sir William Jones lost this valuable parent when he was only three years old; so that the care of his first education devolved upon his mother. She also was a person of superior endowments, and cultivated his dawning powers with a sagacious assiduity which undoubtedly contributed to their quick and surprising growth. We may judge of what a pupil she had, when we are told that, at five years of age, one morning, in turning over the leaves of a Bible, he fixed his attention with the strongest admiration on a sublime passage in the Revelation. Human nature perhaps presents no authentic picture of its felicity more

pure or satisfactory than that of such a pupil superintended by a mother capable of directing him.

At the age of seven he went to Harrow school, where his progress was at first interrupted by an accident which, he met with in having his thigh-bone broken, and he was obliged to be taken home for about a twelvemonth. But after his return his abilities were so distinguished, that before he left Harrow he was shown to strangers as an ornament to the seminary. Before he had reached this eminence at school, it is a fact, disgraceful to one of his teachers, that, in consequence of the ground which he had lost by the accident already mentioned, he was frequently subjected to punishment for exertions which he could not make, or, to use his own expression, for not being able to soar before he had been taught to fly. The system of severity must have been merciless indeed when it applied to Jones, of whom his master, Dr. Thackery, used to say that he was a boy of so active a spirit, that, if left friendless and naked on Salisbury Plain, he would make his way to fame and fortune. It is related of him, that while at Harrow, his fellow-scholars having determined to act the play of 'The Tempest,' they were at a loss for a copy, and that young Jones wrote out the whole from memory. Such miracles of human recollection are certainly on record, but it is not easy to conceive the boys at Harrow, when permitted by their masters to act a play, to have been at a loss for a copy of Shakspeare, and some mistake or exaggeration may be suspected in the anecdote. He possibly abridged the play for the particular occasion. Before leaving Harrow school he learned the Arabic characters, and studied the Hebrew language so as to enable him to read some of the original Psalms. What would have been labour to others was Jones's amusement. He used to relax his mind with Phillidor's Lessons at Chess,' and with studying botany and fossils.

In his eighteenth year he was entered of University College, Oxford, where his residence was rendered more agreeable by his mother taking up her abode in the town. He was also, fortunately, permitted by his teachers to forsake the study of dialectic logic, which still haunted the college, for that of Oriental literature; and he was so zealous in this pursuit that he brought from London to Oxford a native of Aleppo, whom he maintained at his own expense, for the benefit of his instructions in Arabic.

He also began the study of modern Persic, and found his exertions rewarded with rapid success. His vacations were spent in London, where he attended schools for riding and fencing, and studied Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. He pursued in theory, and even exceeded in practice, the plan of education projected by Milton; and boasted that with the fortune of a peasant he could give himself the education of a prince. He obtained a fellowship at Oxford; but before he obtained it, whilst he was yet fearful of his success, and of burthening the slender finances of an affectionate mother for his support, he accepted the situation of tutor to Lord Althorp, the son of Earl Spencer. In the summer of 1765 he repaired to Wimbledon Park, to take upon himself the charge of his young pupil. He had not been long in Lord Spencer's family when he was flattered by an offer from the Duke of Grafton of the place of interpreter of Eastern languages. This situation, though it might not have interfered with his other pursuits, he thought fit to decline; but earnestly requested that it might be given to his Syrian teacher, Mirza, whose character he wrote. The solicitation was, however, unnoticed; and the event only gave him an opportunity of regretting his own ignorance of the world in not accepting the proffered office, that he might consign its emoluments to Mirza. At Wimbledon he first formed his acquaintance with the daughter of Dr. Shipley, the Dean of Winchester, to which he owed the future happiness of his life. The ensuing winter, 1766, he removed with Lord Spencer's family to London, where he renewed his pursuit of external as well as intellectual accomplishments, and received lessons from Gallini as well as Angelo. It is amusing to find his biographer add that he took lessons at the broadsword from an old Chelsea pensioner, seamed with scars, to whose military narrations he used to listen with delight.

In 1767 he made a short trip with the family of his pupil to the Continent, where, at Spa, he pursued the study of German, and availed himself of the opportunity of finding an incomparable teacher of dancing, whose name was Janson. In the following year he was requested by the secretary of the Duke of Grafton to undertake a task in which no other scholar in England was found willing to engage, namely, in furnishing a version of an Eastern MS., a life of Nadir Shaw, which the King of Denmark had brought with him to England, and which his Danish Majesty

was anxious to have translated into French. Mr. Jones undertook the translation from a laudable reluctance to allow the MS. to be carried out of the country for want of a translator, although the subject was dry, and the style of the original difficult, and although it obliged him to submit his translation to a native of France, in order to give it the idioms of a French style. He was at this time only twenty-one years of age. The only reward which he obtained for his labour was a diploma from the Royal Society of Copenhagen, and a recommendation from the court of Denmark to his own sovereign. To 'The History of Nadir Shaw' he added a treatise of his own on Oriental poetry, in the language of the translation. In the same year he began the study of music, and took some lessons on the Welsh harp.

In 1770 he again visited the Continent with the Spencer family, and travelled into Italy. The genius which interests us at home redoubles its interest on foreign ground; but it would appear, from Jones's letters, that in this instance he was too assiduous a scholar to be an amusing traveller. His mind, during this visit to the Continent, was less intent on men and manners than on objects which he might have studied with equal advantage at home. We find him deciphering Chinese, and composing a tragedy. The tragedy has been irrecoverably lost. Its subject was the death of Mustapha, the son of Soliman; the same on which Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, composed a drama.

On his return to England he determined to embrace the law as a profession, the study of which he commenced in 1771, being then in his twenty-fourth year. His motives for choosing this profession are best explained in his own words. In a letter to his friend Schultens he avows at once the public ambition and personal pride which had now grown up with the maturity of his character. "The die," he says, "is cast. All my books and MSS., with the exception of those only which relate to law and oratory, are locked up at Oxford; and I have determined, for the next twenty years at least, to renounce all studies but those which are connected with my profession. It is needless to trouble you with my reasons at length for this determination. I will only say that, if I had lived at Rome or Athens, I should have preferred the labours, studies, and dangers of their orators and illustrious citizens, connected as they were with banishment and even death, to the groves of the poets, or the gardens of the