PORSON (RICHARD), the greatest of the verbal critics and classical scholars of modern times, born 25th December 1759, was the son of Mr Huggin Porson, parish clerk of East Ruston, near North Walsham, in Norfolk.
His father taught him, in his childhood, to practise all the common rules of arithmetic by memory only; and, before he was nine years old, he had learned to extract the cube root in this manner. He employed, at the same time, for teaching him to read and write, the method which has since been generally introduced in the schools of mutual instruction, making him draw the letters with chalk or on sand: and the neatness and accuracy of his handwriting, for which he was distinguished through life, may be considered as bearing ample testimony to his father's ingenuity and success.
At the age of nine he was sent to a village school, kept by a Mr Summers; but his father still made him repeat by heart in the evening the whole of the lessons of the day, and there seems to be sufficient evidence for considering this practice of exercising the memory continually, in very early life, as the best, if not the only method of cultivating, if not of producing great talent: for though a strong memory by no means constitutes talent, yet its possession is almost a necessary condition for the successful exertion of talent in general, and, indeed, it is very possible that the other faculties of the mind may be strengthened by the early cultivation of this one. It is remarkable that Wallis, who was as deservedly celebrated in his day as Porson, for his unerring sagacity, had also a singular facility of retaining numbers and calculations in his memory, but without having taken any particular pains to acquire the habit. Mr Hewitt, the vicar of the parish of East Ruston, hearing of young Porson's uncommon capacity, undertook to instruct both him and his brother Thomas in classical literature; and when he was about fifteen, Mr Norris, a wealthy and respectable gentleman of the neighbourhood, having ascertained the truth of the reports that he heard of him, resolved to be at the expense of sending him to Eton. Without this assistance, it would have been impossible for Porson to have acquired great excellence in any intellectual pursuit; for his father's situation in life was not such as to exempt his son even from the subordinate occupations of the country. He went out gleaning, in the autumn, with a Horace in his pocket; and he had learned by experience to appreciate the mechanical labours of Penelope, before he was much acquainted with the wisdom and wanderings of Ulysses.
At Eton, his talents procured him the friendship and admiration of the seniors among his schoolfellows, and, upon the unfortunate death of his first patron, Mr Norris, he found a number of liberal contributors, who stepped forward to supply the deficiency; but by far the most active of them was Sir George Baker, then President of the Royal College of Physicians; a man as much distinguished by his own classical taste and acquirements, as by his laudable disposition to cherish learning in others. He received the boy into his house for a vacation, and undertook, at the request of a relation of Mr Norris,
the disagreeable task of receiving, in small sums, as much as was sufficient to purchase an income of £80 a year, for a few years, in the short annuities, which served, with great economy, to enable him to remain at Eton. This favour appears to have been too great to be properly acknowledged, or perhaps even duly appreciated, by its object, who only after many years paid Sir George the tardy compliment of a dedication, not, however, of an edition, but of a handsome copy of a single play of Euripides. In his own opinion, Porson learned little at Eton besides the quantity of syllables, being able to repeat by heart before he went there the principal part of the authors that he had to read; that is, almost the whole of Horace and Virgil, and the Iliad, and many parts of Cicero, Livy, and the Odyssey. A story is accordingly told of his book having been changed by one of his schoolfellows in joke, when he was going up to a lesson in Horace, and of his having read and translated what was required of him, without at all betraying the change to the master. At the same time, the emulation of a public school must have been a great advantage to him, as affording him a motive for exertion in his exercises, whether they were to be called his own, or to be written for other boys. It was a copy of Toup's Longinus, presented to him as a reward for a good exercise, that first gave him a decided inclination for the pursuit of critical researches; but he always considered Bentley and Dawes as his great masters in criticism.
In 1777 he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, and at first he began to apply more particularly to the mathematics, which had been the favourite study of his boyhood, and in which, as he himself remarked, his proficiency first brought him into a certain degree of public notice. He was, however, soon diverted from the pursuit, although he attained a place among the senior optimes of his year. But he was in fact more calculated for classical than for mathematical excellence; his memory would have been in a great measure thrown away, if he had been employed in abstract calculations; and his inventive powers do not appear to have been at all of the same class with his retentive faculties; although certainly in the mechanical pursuit of the fashionable methods of modern analysis, which are intended, like steam engines, to overcome all difficulties by the inanimate forces of mere patience and perseverance, he was capable of filling as distinguished a place as any living algebraist. The classical prize medal, and the university scholarship, he obtained without difficulty, as matters of course. The exercise, which he exhibited upon the examination for the scholarship, is the well known translation of an epitaph into Greek iambics; which, although not free from some inaccuracies in the use of the tenses, is still a very remarkable production, when it is considered as having been completed in less than an hour, with the help of Morell's Thesaurus only, and never afterwards corrected.
He obtained a fellowship of Trinity College in 1781, and took his degree of Master of Arts in 1785; but not thinking it right to subscribe the Articles of the Church of England, he could not enter into orders, and he was therefore unavoidably de-