HARRIS, James, an English gentleman distinguished by his writings on the subject of grammar, was born on the 20th of July 1709. He received his early educational Salisbury, whence he was removed to Oxford at the age of sixteen; and having passed the usual number of years as a gentleman commoner of W r adham College, he was entered at Lincoln’s Inn as a student of law, though not intended for the bar. When he had attained his twenty-fourth year, his father died; and this event having at once freed him from all control, and placed him in the possession of an independent fortune, enabled him to exchange the study of law for other pursuits more congenial to his taste. The decided bent of his mind had always been towards the Greek and Latin classics, which he preferred to every other kind of reading; and to the study of these authors he now applied himself with unremitting assiduity during a period of fourteen or fifteen years. The first fruit of this lengthened course of application was a volume which he published in 1744, containing three treatises; one on art, another on music, painting, and poetry, and a third on happiness. These treatises are illustrated with a variety of learned notes and observations; and one of them, that upon art, has been commended by Lord Monboddo as containing“the best specimen of the dividing or diaeretic manner, as the ancients called it, that is to be found in any modern book.” But the work by which he is best known is his Hermes, a philosophical inquiry concerning universal grammar, which appeared in 1751,8vo. “Those who would enter deeply into the subject” (of universal grammar), says Dr Lowth, “will find it fully and accurately handled, with the greatest acuteness of investigation, perspicuity of application, and elegance of method, in a treatise entitled Hermes, by James Harris, Esq.; the most beautiful example of analysis that has been exhibited since the days of Aristotle.” To this culogium, however, the philosophical grammarians of the present time are not by any means disposed to subscribe. Without questioning the learning displayed in the Hermes, we may venture to affirm, that the arrangement of the parts of speech into substantives, attributives, definitives, and connectives, is entirely arbitrary; that nothing whatever is gained by this departure from the ordinary classification, excepting perhaps to impart to the work an appearance of originality, which, upon examination, will be found to vanish; that, though professing to treat the subject of grammar in a philosophical manner, Mr Harris is in reality the slave of authority; and that there is no quality for which his work is less distinguished than that rigid analysis which Bishop Lowth has somewhat hastily given him credit for. This, we think, has been fully established in the article Grammar of the present work, to which accordingly the reader is referred for more ample information. Mr Harris’s attention seems to have been first directed to this subject by the Minerva of Sanctius, to which he has confessed himself indebted for much valuable information; but it is somewhat remarkable, that with the treatise of Apollonius {De Constructione Orationis) also before him, he should not have avoided the narrow and confined views which he has adopted on particular points, or should have missed principles which would have served to guide him through the intricacies in which he is frequently entangled. Mr Harris’s other productions are, Philosophical Arrangements, published in [7:11:155]1775, being part of a larger work which he had meditated, but did not complete, on the peripatetic logic; and Phi- • lological Inquiries, printed in 1780, but not published till 1781, containing not so much a regular system, as a summary of the conclusions to which the philosophy of the ancients had conducted them in their critical inquiries. After having been quite exhausted by illness, Mr Harris expired on the 22d of December 1780, in the seventy-second year of his age. In 1801, his son Lord Malmesbury published an edition of his works in two volumes quarto; prefixed to which is a biographical sketch of the author from the pen of the editor. (a.) Harris, a district of the Hebrides, forming, with the larger district of Lewis, one considerable island. In one part it is divided into nearly two parts by the approximation of West Loch Tarbet and East Loch Tarbet, which leave only a neck of land of about half a mile in breadth. At the head of the former is situated the solitary village of Tarbet Harris is about twenty miles in length, by eleven in breadth in the northern part, and from six to seven in the southern. It is bleak, rocky, and unproductive. On the shores, however, there are small patches of cultivated land; the rearing of cows and black cattle further tends to support the inhabitants; but until the duty on barilla was lowered, their chief source of profit was the manufacture of kelp. This, however, is now considerably reduced. Harris is an independent parish in the presbytery of Wick, and its kirk-town and capital is Rowadill or Rowdill, a small village at the south-east corner of the island. The population amounted in 1821 to 3909, and in 1831 to 3900.