TOOKE, John Horne, an ingenious grammarian, and an active politician, born in Westminster, June 1736, was the son of Mr John Horne, a poulterer living in Newport Market. He was the third of seven children; but his father, having acquired considerable affluence, first sent him for a short time to Westminster school, and then to Eton, where he remained five or six years without particularly distinguishing himself, and was removed sooner than had been intended, on account of the accidental loss of an eye. In 1755 he went to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he took the degree of A.B. He then became an usher in a school at Blackheath, kept by Mr Jennings; but he was soon after induced by his father to take deacon’s orders, and obtained a curacy in Kent. His own preference, however, was so much in favour of the law, that in 1756 he entered as a student of the Middle Temple; but in 1760 he was persuaded to return to the church, and to receive ordination as a priest; and he officiated for three years in the chapelry of New Brentford, which his father had purchased for him; performing his duties with decency, and taking some pains to study the elements of medicine for the sake of the poorer members of his congregation. He then went as tutor to France with the son of Mr Elwes, a gentleman of Berkshire, well known for his riches and his economy.

In 1765, he commenced his political career by writing an anonymous pamphlet in defence of Wilkes and his party. He returned to the continent, and made the tour of Italy in company with a Mr Taylor; and at Paris he formed an intimacy with Wilkes himself, who then found it convenient to reside there. He had altogether laid aside his clerical character in these excursions, but he resumed it tor a short time after his return. Soon, however, he relapsed[7:21:335] into his political amusements; exerting himself, with some success, in various elections, as a partisan of his friend Wilkes, and taking up the cause of a Mrs Bigby, in the pursuit of an appeal of blood, against the murderers of her husband, who were supposed to have obtained a pardon through corrupt interest with the court; though the widow at last disappointed him by accepting a pecuniary compensation for her right of appeal. He was however successful, on his own behalf, in repelling a prosecution for a libel on Mr Onslow; and he gained some credit with a party in the city by suggesting to Beckford, then lord mayor of London, the reply which he made to the king’s answer to their remonstrance, and which may still be seen engraved on the pedestal of Beckford’s statue in Guildhall. He was soon after very active in establishing the society for supporting the bill of rights, and in obtaining the liberation of Bingley, the printer, who had been somewhat hastily committed to prison by Lord Mansfield.

In the year 1770, he had reason to be dissatisfied with the conduct of Wilkes, in some pecuniary transactions relating to the society for the bill of rights. Both parties appeared to the public in a light somewhat ridiculous on the occasion, and neither of them gained in respectability, though the society did not appear to value Wilkes the less for the exposures that took place. It was, however, shortly after dissolved, and most of its members, except the particular friends of Wilkes, were incorporated into the constitutional society. The next year, Mr Tooke completed his academical course at Cambridge, by taking the degree of A. M., though not without some opposition. About this time he exerted himself greatly in procuring the publication of the debates of the House of Commons in the daily papers, notwithstanding the well-known standing orders of the house; and so far as he was instrumental in carrying this point, he appears to have rendered at least one very essential service to his country; but Wilkes, and especially Almon, the bookseller, are said to have a still stronger claim to the merit of this transaction, whatever may have been its character. He had also a sharp contest with the anonymous Junius, against whose hasty attack he defended himself with great spirit and energy, and with unexampled success. In 1773 he made a formal resignation of his living, and meant at the same time completely to lay aside his clerical character, though no person seems to have felt himself authorized to accept this part of his resignation; and he began to study the law very diligently, intending to make it the occupation of his life. He adopted soon after a singular method of forcing himself upon the notice of the public, and of the House of Commons in particular: an enclosure bill being about to be hurried, as was reported, a little too rapidly through the house, he wrote some paragraphs in a newspaper, which reflected very severely on the conduct of the Speaker, on purpose that he might be summoned to appear before the house; and being placed at the bar, he gave such reasons for his conduct as produced some animated discussions, and in the end was supposed, though probably without foundation, to have caused the bill to be modified in some oppressive clauses. By these means he obtained the favour of Mr Tooke of Purley, who thought himself aggrieved by the bill in its original state, and received from him such assurances of testamentary favours as induced his nephew, Colonel Harwood, to agree upon a partition of their joint interest in the reversion of his estate; though Mr Horne never received, first and last, more than L.8000 from the property, notwithstanding the subsequent change of his name about the year 1782, in acknowledgment of his patron’s kindness, and his long-continued intimacy and frequent residence at Purley; the principal legatee, after all, being a Mr Beaseley.

Mr Home Tooke was, of course, a strenuous opposer of the American war; and in 1777, he published a very offensive advertisement, in which the sufferers in the battle of Lexington were described as having been murdered by the king’s troops. For this attack on the government, he was tried at Guildhall in July 1777. He conducted his own defence, but was found guilty of the libel, and sen-tenced to one year’s imprisonment in the King’s Bench, and a fine of L.200. It was on this occasion that he first appeared before the public as a grammarian, in the criticisms which constitute his celebrated “Letter to Mr Dunning.” The next year he suffered a still severer punishment, in the refusal of the society of the Inner Temple to admit him to the bar, on account of his having taken orders; so that his prospects of professional advancement were utterly annihilated. This occurrence made him still more bitter against the existing government, and in 1780 he printed some severe remarks upon the measures of Lord North. He attempted to establish himself as a practical farmer in Huntingdonshire; but he caught an ague, and soon becoming disgusted with an agricultural life, he returned to London, and occupied for some years a house near Soho Square. His ideas of parliamentary reform, contained in a second letter addressed to Mr Dunning, were by no means extravagant, and he continued to adhere, in this respect, rather to the party of Mr Pitt than to that of Mr Fox.

The publication of his grammatical dissertations, under the title of the Diversions of Purley, afforded but a slight and imperfect intermission of his political pursuits, for his etymological works are as replete with the politics of the day as his speeches and his pamphlets. Another of his pamphlets appeared in 1788, under the title of Two Pair of Portraits, being intended to serve the cause of Pitt’s party in their elections. But in 1790 be himself became a candidate for the representation of Westminster, in opposition to Mr Fox and to Lord Hood; and he distinguished himself sufficiently as a public orator, though he was not succcessful in the contest.

In 1794, he was tried for high treason, together with several other members of the corresponding societies, who had been active in attempting to introduce some imitations of the French Revolution in the plans of reform which they brought forward. He exhibited on the trial somewhat more of firmness than of good taste. One of his associates had before been acquitted, and the jury speedily returned a similar verdict with respect to himself. He afterwards dedicated the second volume of his Diversions of Purley to his counsel, Gibbs and Erskine, and to the jury who tried him.

In 1796 he again became a candidate for the representation of Westminster, but again without success; and, notwithstanding his strong opinions respecting a reform in parliament, he afterwards condescended to accept from Lord Camelford, in 1801, a seat for the nominal borough of Old Sarum. It was then to be determined if a clergyman could sit in the House of Commons; but the ministry, instead of contesting the point with respect to his particular case, brought in a bill to decide the question in the negative for the future, and he remained in the house till the dissolution of the parliament in the next year, but without f>articularly distinguishing himself in its proceedings. His ast public effort as a party man was made in espousing for a short time the cause of Mr Paull, as candidate for Westminster; but he abandoned this gentleman in a subsequent contest. The later years of his life were chiefly passed in the society of a select circle of friends, who frequently partook of his hospitality at Wimbledon. He died in March 1812, leaving his property to some natural daughters; for he had never been married. He was buried in Ealing church, and not in his garden, as he had directed; his executors thinking themselves the less bound by these [7:21:336]instructions, as a literal compliance with them might have ’ been unfavourable to the sale of the property.

1. His earliest publication was a pamphlet entitled The Petition of an Englishman, 1765. It consisted principally of apologies for the private conduct and immoral writings of Wilkes.

2. He also published a Sermon while he continued in the church, that is, before the year 1773; but it attracted little notice.

3. A Letter to Mr Dunning, 1778. The rudiments of his grammatical system, arising out of remarks on the particles employed by the attorney-general in his indictment, and by the judges in his sentence. It was afterwards incorporated into the Diversions of Purley.

4. Facts, 1780; consisting of remarks on the administration of Lord North; with some additions relating to finance, by Dr Price.

5. A Letter on Parliamentary Reform, 1782; addressed to Mr Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton.

6. E πεα ∏ τεgοεντα , or Diversions of Purley, 1786, 8vo. Ed. 2, 4to. Part i. 1798. Part ii. 1802. This is his great and celebrated work; rich indeed in etymology and in wit, but meagre in definition and in metaphysics.

7. A Letter to the Prince of Wales, 1787; relating to his supposed marriage with a Catholic.

8. Two Pair of Portraits, 1788, 8vo. The two Pitts contrasted, in opposite columns, with the two Foxes, in colours by no means favourable to the latter.

9. Many of his Letters have been printed in Stephens’s Life of Tooke.

It is from the last-mentioned publication that this historical sketch of Mr Tooke’s life has principally been extracted. It now becomes necessary to add some remarks on his literary and moral qualifications; and in both these points of view the subject has been treated in so masterly a manner by the author of an article in the Quarterly Review, who is supposed to be a near relation of Tooke’s most intimate friend, the late Colonel Bosville, that it would be presumption in any man to go over the same ground, without adopting very nearly the eloquent and energetic expressions which that noble and learned person has employed.

“Mr Tooke,” says the accomplished reviewer of the Memoirs of his Life (Q. R. vol. vii. p. 325), “was possessed of considerable learning, as indeed his writings sufficiently show. To other more casual acquirements, he united a very extensive acquaintance with the Gothic dialects, of which he has so copiously and so judiciously availed himself in his etymological researches.” But it must be remarked, that a person more intimately acquainted with the “Gothic dialects” as living languages, will easily discover that his knowledge of them was in truth but superficial, or that he was indebted for it more to grammars and dictionaries, than to any extensive study of the authors who had written in those languages, or to any habit of speaking them; and such a person will easily find a variety of instances, in which a very different etymon to that which he has assigned, will naturally suggest itself as the true origin of the word in question.

(P. 320.) “Though Mr Tooke’s philosophical works are the results of no common talent and industry, yet they are neither written in a truly philosophical spirit, nor do they display traces of a mind which, even if it had been wholly dedicated to the study of metaphysics, would have much enlarged the bounds of our knowledge in that nice and intricate branch of science. His object seems to have been rather to retard than to advance the progress of philosophy, by recalling us from those sound conclusions as to the nature and operations of the human mind, which are built upon observation and experience, to vague speculations, drawn from the imperfect analogy existing between the moral and the physical world. There can be no doubt that the proposition which he has succeeded in establishing is highly interesting and important; and that in the illustration of it he has shown great learning, ingenuity, and research. But then, on the other hand, he has so monstrously exaggerated its importance, and so widely mistaken its tendency, and has attempted to raise so vast a superstructure upon such a narrow, slippery, and inadequate foundation, that we are quite lost in amazement when we recollect how completely the sagacity which guided him so well in the investigation of his principal fact, appears to desert him when he comes to apply that fact to the purposes of a theory. The distance between what he has proved and what he wishes us to believe that he has proved, is enormous. What he has proved is, that all words, even those that are expressive of the nicest operations of our minds, were originally borrowed from the objects of external perception; a circumstance highly curious in the history of language, consequently in the history of the human mind itself, and the complete demonstration of which, of course, reflects great credit upon its author. What he thinks he has proved is, that this etymological history of words is our true guide, both as to the present import of the words themselves, and as to the nature of those things which they are intended to signify; a proposition so monstrous that he has nowhere ventured to enunciate it in its general form, but has rather left it to be collected from the tenor of his remarks upon particular instances. In truth, the inferences at which Mr Tooke arrived, far from being warranted by his facts, are directly the contrary of those to which he ought naturally to have been led by the result of his own studies, when they were most successful. In tracing upwards, through all the mazes of etymology, the origin of words, he ought to have seen more clearly, if possible, than any body else, that their real present sense is not to be sought for in their primitive signification, or in the elements of which they were originally composed, but that, on the contrary, their actual import, with which alone in reasoning we have to do, hardly ever corresponds with their etymological meaning, although the one always bears to the other a certain resemblance, more or less accurate, according to the greater or less effect of time and accident. One could without difficulty understand how a person, unaccustomed to such considerations, and misled by a few instances partially chosen, should adopt a theory like that which Mr Tooke was desirous to establish; but how a philosopher, minutely acquainted with the whole subject, and proceeding upon a most copious induction of particulars, should not have perceived that, in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, such a doctrine would lead to absolute absurdity, is, to us at least, inconceivable.”

The reviewer then follows Mr Dugald Stewart in some very just criticisms, which this distinguished philosopher had already made on several of Mr Tooke’s examples, fully proving the complete fallacy of the system which so completely confounds the definition of a term with its etymology. Mr Tooke has indeed the merit of having demonstrated pretty clearly that all the parts of speech, including those which grammarians had often considered as expletives and unmeaning particles, may be resolved more or less completely into nouns and verbs; but, on the one hand, it has been observed, that the very same doctrine may be clearly traced back to the works of Aristotle; and, on the other, it may be asserted with equal truth, if we wish to carry the theory to its utmost extent, that language consists only of nouns and one verb; since all verbs may in fact be resolved into participles or adjectives, compounded with auxiliary verbs, as well as those which exhibit this complication in their exterior form.

“In the ordinary intercourse of life, Mr Tooke was kind, friendly, and hospitable.” (P. 325.) We doubt whether [7:21:337]his temper was naturally good; but if it was not, he had a merit the more; for he had so completely subdued it by care and self-control, as never to betray, under any provocation, the slightest mark of that irritability which often accompanies talent, and which gains so rapidly upon those who know not how to guard against its approaches. Indeed the aspect under which he appeared in private was by no means such as the stern cynicism and ferocious turbulence of his public conduct would have led one to expect; and those whose opinion of him has been formed exclusively upon his political character and his writings, will have some difficulty in believing that the curate of Brentford was one of the best bred gentlemen of that age. In this respect he was a sort of phenomenon. He was born in a low station; at no period did he appear to have possessed any remarkable advantages for the study of good breeding; on the contrary, the greater part of his life was spent in constant intercourse with coarse, vulgar, and uneducated men; yet his natural taste was so good, and he had profited so judiciously by whatever opportunities he enjoyed, that courts and high stations have seldom produced a better example of polite and elegant behaviour, than was exhibited by the associate of Messrs Hardy and Thelwall. Indeed his manner had almost every excellence that manner can display; grace, vivacity, frankness, dignity. Perhaps, indeed, in its outward forms, and in that which is purely conventional, his courtesy wore the air of the vicille cour, and was rather more elaborate than is consistent with the practice of this lounging unceremonious age; but it was never forced or constrained, and it sat not ungracefully upon an old man.” It may however deserve to be remarked, in contemplating this paradox, though rather as a collateral coincidence than as a satisfactory explanation, that even from his infancy Tooke had actually seen something of the very highest society, having been admitted once or twice a week at Leicester House as a play-fellow to George the Third; and though he may have learned but little from imitation of the manners of the young prince, yet the early habit of self restraint imposed by such a presence, may easily have imprinted some courtly traces on his character, which were not easily effaced, and which an association with the heirs of the first families of the kingdom, throughout his boyhood, at Westminster and at Eton, must naturally have made still more distinct and permanent.

“He never appeared to greater advantage than in conversation. He possessed an inexhaustible fund of anecdotes, which he introduced with great skill, and related with neatness, grace, rapidity, and pleasantry: he had a quick sense of the ridiculous, and was a great master of the whole art of raillery, a dangerous talent, though the exercise of it in his hands was always tempered by politeness and good humour.”

“In spite of labour and dissipation (p. 328), his life was protracted to a period which indicated an originally sound and vigorous frame. For the last twenty years, however, he was subject to several severe, distressing, and incurable infirmities. These he bore with a patience and firmness which it was impossible not to admire: to the very last he never suffered himself to be beaten down by them, nor ever for one moment indulged in complaint, or gave way to despondency. In the intervals of pain, nay, even when actually suffering under it, he preserved a self-command, which enabled him to converse, not only with spirit and vigour, but with all his accustomed cheerfulness and pleasantry; never making any demand upon the sympathy of his friends, or mentioning his own situation at all, except when occasionally, and by a very pardonable exercise of his sophistry, he amused himself in exalting its comforts, and explaining away its disadvantages; displaying, in this respect, a manly spirit and a practical philosophy, which, if they had been brought tn bear upon his moral as well as upon his physical condition, if they had been employed with as much effect in reconciling him to his political exclusion as to his bodily sufferings, might have produced, not the very imperfect character we have been attempting to delineate, in which the unfavourable traits bear so large a proportion to those of a nobler and more benign cast, but the venerable portrait of a truly wise and virtuous man.”^[1. Stepbenn’s Memoirs of John Horne Tooke. Lond. 1813, 2 vols. 8vo. Quarterly Review, vol. vii. p. 320. British Critic, N. 8. vol. i. p. 79, 193. Aikin’s General Biography, vol. ix. p. 449. Chalmen’s Biographical Dictionary, vol. xxix. p. 449. ] (l. l.)