-A man who would have foil'd, at their own play,
A dozen would-bes of the modern day :
Who, when occasion justified its use,
Had wit as bright as ready to produce;
Could fetch from records of an earlier age,
Or from philosophy's enlighten'd page,
His rich materials, and regale your ear
With strains it was a privilege to hear:
Yet above all, his luxury supreme,

And his chief glory, was the gospel theme;
There he was copious as old Greece or Rome,
His happy eloquence seem'd there at home;
Ambitious, not to shine or to excel,

But to treat justly what he loved so well."

But though Mr. Horne thus well began, and to the end of life continued, so far as he was truly known, to prosper in all that he undertook,-it was only by the diligent employment of his talents, and their application, in the best manner to the best things, that he was enabled to excel, both in virtue and learning, the multitude of his contemporaries. His talents may not have been of the highest order, but they were of that order which are much oftener rendered useful than those of the first, partly because they are more frequently found, (as qualifications of the greatest necessity generally are,) but especially because the possessor is under obligation to improve his own share to the utmost, if he would rise to honourable distinction among his fellows, or as a good and faithful servant, occupy them profitably till his Lord should call him to account. What

ever may have been their relative proportion to the natural endowments of others, Mr. Horne's abilities were far above mediocrity; and they were peculiarly sound, healthful, and suited for practical purposes of the most beneficial kind; while, being united with lively fancy and amiable affections, they were not expended on curious and subtle, profound and inconclusive speculations in morals or religion, frittered away in the refinements of verbal criticism, nor entangled, beyond the possibility of extrication for any sublimer occupation, in abstruse mathematical perplexities;-but they were uniformly exercised on themes of the most solemn, august, and animating character, involving the present peace, the future hope, the eternal happiness (with the tremendous alternatives of these) of every individual (whether apart or in society) of the whole human race. And he cultivated those talents, it may be said, in the open air, in the broad sunshine, under the fostering sky, in their native soil, that they might produce leaves, flowers, and fruits in their season-not stoving them in hothouses, or rearing them under glasses, to force the bud, blossom, and seed to appear prematurely and against nature, as rarities to be admired, and when admiration ceased, to be no further regarded. Like Timothy, from a child having known the Scriptures, which are able to make wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus,' he spent all his powers

of mind, and hallowed the whole affection of his nature, to learn for himself every lesson which these taught for that purpose, that he might be so instructed as to teach others how to apply for themselves, to the same source of all heavenly knowledge; with the assurance of thereby attaining to the like precious faith, which had come to him by hearing of the word, the same hope full of immortality which had been inspired into his soul, and a measure of the love of God shed abroad in their hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto them, which he had experienced.

The earnest conscientiousness and scrupulous reverence with which he thus searched the Scriptures, may have betrayed him, on the one hand, to cleave more pertinaciously than became so acute a critic, so disciplined a scholar, and so zealous a divine, to the letter of the Hebrew text, as settled by the authority of Cardinal Ximenes in the sixteenth century; and, on the other hand, to indulge in such latitude of spiritual interpretation of that very letter, as (in some cases) to make the simplest forms of speech complex, by evolving meanings from them, which could never have been suspected but upon an assumed principle of general application (of the Psalms for example, as we shall see hereafter) to the Messiah in almost every clause and every phrase, that could be wrested from its apparently most obvious sense. By this he exposed

himself (not without plausible pretext on the part of his gainsayers) to the charge of being a disciple of the once-celebrated John Hutchinson; an imputation from which he took considerable pains to exonerate himself. Whether he did so or not, he certainly exposed, with great tact and dexterity, the ignorance of his accusers on the nature of the very charges which they preferred against him, proving that they did not so much as know what the doctrines of Hutchinson were. That extraordinary man had professed to find, in his own mode of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures, the true system of nature, in confutation of Newton's mathematical theories, and the true system of religion, in opposition to the controverted orthodoxy of Dr. Samuel Clarke's principles in divinity. The fact was, that about this time (the middle of the eighteenth century) the attention of Mr. Horne and his erudite Oxford friends was very much turned towards the study of the Old Testament Scriptures in the original tongues, and the insolvable question,-which is the right mode of reading the Hebrew text, with or without the vowelpoints? The latter were pronounced by Hutchinson to be Jewish forgeries of later date than the fifth century, and invented for the express purpose of misinterpreting the oracles of God, and preventing those who searched for Christ in them, from finding Him there. The subject being too comprehensive and intricate to be further discussed in

this place, it is sufficient to say, that how far Mr. Horne, for a time, was disturbed from his quiet course, in consequence of the crossing of his orbit by the above-named eccentric comet, both in philosophy and theology, may be known by perusing Mr.Jones's abstract from one of his letters, written during that transition-period to his father; wherein he gives a summary of his studies and researches on these difficult topics, and the result so far as they had influenced his opinions, religious and scientific. Certain it is, that extraordinary jealousy of every departure from the received letter of the original Scriptures was infused into his mind, with a corresponding prejudice against those philosophers whom he imagined to have secretly combined with infidels, by their speculations on the laws of the material universe, to invalidate the Scripture testimony of facts referring to the same; prejudice and jealousy which he never entirely overcame. The latter was especially manifested in his opposition to the scheme of Dr. Kennicott, by the collation and comparison, according to their estimated value, of manuscripts, to produce as perfect a copy as possible of the Hebrew Scriptures. Mr. Horne's objections originated in suspicion, that, under pretence of the received text being corrupt in some places, and in others defective, it was the occult purpose of the revisors to render it actually defective and corrupt, by the rejection of what was suf