hom as scholars were of no great account--who make much
figure in purely literary history. Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), an odd
person of uncritical judgment but great learning, who belongs more to
the last volume than to the present, devoted himself chiefly to
mythology, a subject which had not yet attracted general interest, and
which was treated by him and others in a somewhat unhistorical manner.
Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801) was one of the characteristic figures of
the Revolutionary time. He was a Cambridge man, and took orders, but
left the church, became a violent Jacobin, and went to prison for a
seditious libel. He was one of those not very uncommon men who,
personally amiable, become merely vixenish when they write: and his
erudition was much more extensive than sound. But he edited several
classical authors, not wholly without intelligence and scholarship, and
his _Silva Critica_, a sort of _variorum_ commentary from profane
literature on the Bible, was the forerunner, at least in scheme, of a
great deal of work which has been seen since.

A very different person from these in scholarly attainments, in natural
gifts, and (it must unfortunately be added) in personal respectability,
was Richard Porson, who is generally bracketed with Bentley as the
greatest of English scholars, not of our own day, and who might have
been one of the most brilliant of men of letters. He was born in Norfolk
on Christmas Day 1759, of low station, but was well educated by the
parson of the parish, and sent to Eton by a neighbouring squire. In 1779
he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, did
brilliantly in University contests and became fellow in 1782. Although
he was almost a boy the genius of his papers in scholarship attracted
notice at home and abroad, and he made some excursions into general
literature wherein, as in his recorded conversations, he showed
epigrammatic wit of the first rank. He lost his fellowship because he
would not take orders; but was made Regius Professor of Greek, an
appointment which unluckily was then, in both Universities, almost
honorary as regards income. The Whig party accepted his partisanship,
but had no opportunity of rewarding it, and after receiving the
Librarianship of the London Institution in Moorfields, he died of
apoplexy in 1808. He possessed in almost the highest degree that power
of divination, based on accurate knowledge, which distinguishes the
scholar, and it is, as h