PORSON. prived of his fellowship in 1791, having no dependence left for his subsistence through life, but his abilities and acquirements. His friends, however, did not abandon him on this urgent occasion, and in order to keep him out of actual want, a private subscription was set on foot, to which Mr Cracherode was one of the principal contributors, and by which enough was raised to purchase him an annuity of about £100 a year for life. A small addition was made to his income, about two years after, by his election to the Greek Professorship at Cambridge, with a salary of only £40 a year. The situation, however, gave him the option of at least doubling his whole receipts, by the delivery of an annual course of lectures in the university; and it was supposed that he would have made this exertion, if he had not been discouraged by the difficulty of obtaining rooms in his college, where it would have been his wish to reside.
He married, in 1795, Mrs Lunan, a sister of the late Mr Perry, well known as the editor of the Morning Chronicle, but he had the misfortune to lose his wife two years afterwards. Mr Perry continued to be his greatest friend through life, and was so far his best benefactor, as he knew how to oblige him essentially, without the appearance of doing him a favour. Porson had sometimes chambers in the Temple, and sometimes he lodged at the Morning Chronicle office: frequently also he was a visitor at Mr Perry's house at Merton, where he had the misfortune to leave several of his books, at the time of a fire, which destroyed them all, and among them some letters of Rhunkenius, with whom he had begun a correspondence in 1783, and who had communicated to him some valuable fragments of Æschylus, besides his manuscript copy of the lexicon of Photius, which had cost him ten months labour. He used indeed to say that this fire had destroyed the fruits of twenty years of his life; but he had the resolution to complete a second copy of the Photius, which is now in the library of Trinity College. His fondness for the mechanical employment of his pen has been regretted by some of his biographers, as having tempted him to waste much of his most valuable time on a trifling amusement: but in fact, his mode of writing Greek was fully as much calculated for expedition as for beauty; and those, who have not been in the habit of correcting mutilated passages of manuscripts, can form no estimate of the immense advantage that is obtained, by the complete sifting of every letter, which the mind involuntarily performs, while the hand is occupied in tracing it: so that, if the correction of Photius was really worth the labour of two years of Porson's life, it would have been scarcely possible to employ the greater part of those years more advantageously, than by copying him twice over. Mr Weston, in speaking of "his matchless penmanship," has observed, not very intelligibly, that "here, indeed, he thought himself surpassed by" another person "not in the stroke, but the sweep, of his letters:" what Porson really said on this subject was, that, with respect to "command of hand," that person had the advantage, but he preferred the model on which his own hand was formed.
His writing was, in fact, more like that of a scholar, while the method explained in Mr Hodgkin's Calligraphia exhibits more the appearance of the work of a writing master; holding, however, a middle place between the neatness of Porson, and the wonderful accuracy of the country schoolmaster who made the fac simile of the Oxford Pindar in the British Museum.