in question among the poorer sort of the inhabitants. The clerk of the papers, on learning this anecdote, immediately made his appearance, and offered, for five hundred pounds, beforehand, to accommodate him with a small house, situate within the rules, during the whole period of his confinement; but as the payment of a weekly sum was preferred, the negociation was instantly concluded on that basis."

He sustained very material injury, both in his property and his health, from this imprisonment; but the most vexatious circumstance of his whole life was to be encountered soon after his restoration to liberty. He had kept the number of terms requisite as a qualification for being called to the bar, and proceeded to make application for this formality of admittance, without, it seems, the slightest suspicion that an insuperable obstacle was to rise up suddenly, as if from the ground, at his approach. The first and a second application were resisted by a majority of the benchers of the Inner Temple, and with such circumstances as to convince him that any further prosecution of the object would be vain. "This refusal,' says the biographer, was a cruel and severe blow. Indeed it was struck at a vital part; and, I am persuaded, contributed not a little to sour and embitter the remaining portion of his life." The repulse is attributed in part to the "mean jealousy of some practising-lawyers, who were afraid of being eclipsed by a new competitor."

66

Some other reason, however, for the rejection, was to be pretended; and the only thing that even lawyers could found an exception upon, was the circumstance of his having been a clergyman.

Thus rejecting one profession-rejected by another-injured in his small fortune-but elate with the proudest consciousness of talent, he was to commit himself under inauspicious omens, for the remainder of his life, a very protracted remainder, as it proved, to the course of events and chances in a turbulent and changing state of the times. He was, however, certain that no man could have greater promptitude and courage in seizing events, and he might be acquitted of any great excess of vanity if he even flattered himself he could sometimes create them. No disappointments, nor the comparatively humble rank in society in which he was condemned to continue, could, in the smallest degree, repress the tone in which he had assumed to be the censor of the conduct of the uppermost people in the state, whether taken as individuals, or in the imposing pomp of official or legislative combina

tion. Probably no man ever did, on the strength of what he possessed in his mere person, and in the destitution of all advantages of birth, wealth, station, or connexions, maintain, with such perfect and easy uniformity, so challenging and peremptory a manner towards great and pretending folks of all sorts. This arose from the consciousness that at all times he dared to fight any of them, on any subject, at a moment's warning, in writing, in personal dispute, in courts of law, or even, we fear, in that unlawful mode which it is the disgrace of this nation to tolerate.

In 1780 he wrote, in conjunction with Dr. Price, a tract against the American war, which is here represented as having contributed materially to its termination, by hastening the downfall of the wretched statesmen who were carrying it on. When the nation was restored to peace, he seems to have felt an unusual desire to taste it himself. He purchased a small estate near Huntingdon, and applied himself zealously to the study and practice of agriculture, to which he had long had a partiality, as what he regarded as 66 an useful and liberal science."

A violent ague compelled him to a speedy retreat from the reclaiming of marshes, and threw him back on the great town, where he recovered his health, took a house, and fairly closed with his destiny to be for life a wit, scholar, philosopher, and politician, without affluence, or power, or any effectual favour of those who possessed them.

He soon entered with great ardour into the cause of parliamentary reform; by coming forward as the champion of which, in 1782, William Pitt attained little less than the highest pitch of his father's popularity. Horne published a curious and ingenious scheme of a reformed representation and mode of election, of which an outline is here exhibited. But he was

so really intent on the substantial object, that he made no difficulty of dismissing any peculiarity of his own speculations and projects, and coalescing in the apparently more practicable ones of Mr. Pitt-" ingenuously preferring," says Mr. Stephens, "that gentleman's plan to his own."

He became an intimate, earnest, indefatigable co-operator with this youth of promise, in the preparation of the plans and means of purifying the legislature; and entertained the highest respect for his political integrity so late, at least, as 1788, in which year he published, under the title of "Two Pair of

Portraits," an extended and very pointed contrast between Pitt and Fox, greatly to the disadvantage and depreciation of the latter, who was never forgiven by Horne for that decided hostility to popular interests with which he had begun his political career, and his subsequent coalition with Lord North. "While others objected to the inexperience of Mr. Pitt," says our author, “Horne referred to his talents, his candour, his ingenuousness, and augured the happiest results from his labours. He never, it is asserted, carried his principles of political reform beyond those avowed by that statesman, and constantly opposed the doctrines of annual parliaments and universal suffrage,* which were maintained by some of the zealous advocates of the cause, and which, Mr. Stephens says, contributed to defeat that cause by exciting an excessive alarm in the aristocratical part of the nation. It appears that the subject of these memoirs was for some time, notwithstanding all his knowledge of men and politicians, very sanguine in his confidence of its substantial success. It sunk into languor, however, even before the paragon of political virtue ascended into the better light which shines on the high places of the state. How it fared then, and ever since, nobody needs to be told.

"The Diversions of Purley," a book of very moderate size at its first appearance, was published in 1786. We have in the memoirs a whole needless chapter, in the form of an unsatisfactory analysis, instead of a brief general explanation in two or three lucid pages, of the object of the book, and of that peculiarity of its theory in which its acknowledged originality consisted.

In the following year he resumed his pen on a subject which made a great noise in its day, though now gone to its place among forgotten trifles. He vindicated, on the ground of law and general propriety, the reported marriage of the Prince of Wales with Mrs. Fitzherbert, assuming the fact of the marriage as undeniable. His next production was the "Portraits," already noticed, which concluded with these two questions:

First question. Which two of them will you choose to hang up in your cabinets, the Pitts or the Foxes?

* At a somewhat later period it is said that he "hesitated as to the propriety of annual parliaments."

Second question. Where, on your conscience, should the other two be hanged?"

The author remarks what a prodigious alteration there would have been in at least one of the delineations, if the artist had brought the subjects again under his pencil a few years afterwards.

The celebrated trial of Mr. Hastings is mentioned as, within the whole extent of Horne's active life, the only great national concern in which he was content to be neutral; and even in that he strongly censured the mode of proceeding,the multitude of the charges, the long speeches, the appeals to the passions, and the ruinous protraction. He thought if guilt existed it might be ascertained by a very short inquiry; and in that case he was "for punishing the receiver, and restoring the stolen property to the right owners." This might be very excellent doctrine: and therefore it was for owners de facto to beware of even permitting, much more of hastening, any decisive proof of the guilt.

A pleasing circumstance is related of his being applied to for advice relative to an Englishman taken by a corsair and detained in slavery at Algiers, but liberated in consequence of Horne's benevolent exertions. This very circumstance was the cause of his being brought into a certain degree of connexion with the famous and obnoxious London Corresponding Society, of which the biographer relates the very humble origin and the early history.

He made a distinguished figure in the year 1790, by contesting, with Mr. Fox and Lord Hood, the election for Westminster, with the greatest ability, and with no small measure of popularity, which he augmented by turning to the utmost account the refusal of his eminent antagonist to give a pledge for parliamentary reform. His failure, however, was a matter of course, and which he foresaw from the first; but he made it contribute even more than success would have done to his fame, by means of that memorable petition to the House of Commons, which contained certain bold and contemptuous expressions of crimination that have ever since been employed as the most pointed common-places in the censures of its corrupt constitution. The petition was read to the assembly, and received with as much displeasure as it is becoming and dignified for conscious and lofty integrity to manifest, under calumnies which it can calmly defy. The petition was readi

ly voted "frivolous and vexatious;" but it is perhaps to be regretted, nevertheless, that it could not comport with the insulted dignity of the House to vouchsafe, in a very few words, such a notice and specific falsification of the following passage, as to prevent its being so often triumphantly repeated by the factious and the wicked.

"The said scrutiny was, by the direction or approbation of the House of Commons, relinquished, without effect, after having lasted ten months, and with an expense to Sir Cecil Wray of many thousand pounds more than appears by some late proceedings in Chancery to be the allowed average price of a perpetual seat in the House of where seats for legislators are as notoriously bought and sold as stalls and standing for cattle at a fair." Vol. i. p. 94.

The expense occasioned to the other candidates by this petition brought on Horne an action for debt, in which Mr. Fox was successful, notwithstanding the singularly able and animated exertions of the defendant, who could not fail to take full advantage of such an opportunity of throwing out a number of bold and important observations on the rights of juries, and on the flagrant corruptions in the representation, particularly of Westminster.

In 1792, he became impatient of the pure breezes and exhilarating odours of the metropolis, and removed his residence to the village where he continued all the remainder of his life.

It is not, to be sure, a very lengthened apology, and deprecation of loyal and aristocratical anger, that the biographer is disposed to make for the animated interest taken by Mr. Horne Tooke* in this prodigious event (the French Revolution); but even still fewer words might have sufficed. Previously to it the unanimous voice of Englishmen, in notes alternately of scorn and commiseration, had pronounced the French people a nation of slaves; and nothing on earth could be more palpable, than that the slaves of a government have no chance for freedom but through the energy and assertion of their own will. When such a grand national assertion was successfully taking place, to have been otherwise than gratified in beholding it, would have betrayed, in any pretended friend of liberty, a meanly-constituted mind-unless he were a prophet; and we have no faith in any man's intelligence having been,

He had assumed this additional surname in 1782, at the request of the gentleman of that name whose heir he was now understood to be.