WATSON, Richard, Bishop of Landaff, celebrated as an able theologian, and as a professor of chemistry, was born in August 1737, at Heversham near Kendal, in Westmoreland. His ancestors had been farmers of their own estates for several generations; and his father had for forty years been master of the free school at Heversham, but was become infirm, and had resigned it a little before his birth. He was however educated at this school, and continued there till 1754, when he was sent as a sizer to Trinity College, Cambridge. He applied without intermission to his studies, and in 1757 he obtained a scholarship, with particular expressions of approbation from Dr Smith, who was then master. He had made it a constant practice in his mathematical pursuits, to think over the demonstration of every proposition that he studied, in his solitary walks; a habit which must certainly have been very conducive to the improvement of geometrical talent, though it could scarcely be adopted without great labour by those who follow the algebraical mode of analysis in all their investigations. After this period he passed many hours daily, for a considerable portion of his life, in the occupation of instructing others, without much enlarging the scale of his own information, though certainly not without adding to the solidity and precision of his knowledge of the most important elementary truths of science; and when he graduated in 1759, he was classed as the second wrangler, which he seems to have considered, not without reason, as the place of honour for the year, the senior wrangler, who was a Johnian, having, as it was generally believed, been unfairly preferred to him. In October 1760, he became a fellow of Trinity, and in November, assistant tutor of the college. Having taken
Watson. his degree of M. A. in 1762, he was soon afterwards made moderator of the scholastic exercises of the university, an arduous and honourable office, which he also filled in several subsequent years.
In 1764, he undertook a journey to Paris, though without being able to speak the language, in order to take charge of his young friend and pupil Mr Luther, who returned to England with him soon after. He was elected in the same year professor of chemistry, though he had never devoted any portion of his attention to that science; but he soon rendered himself sufficiently master of all that was then known of the science, to give a very popular course of lectures on the subject about a year after his election, with the assistance of an operator whom he had brought from Paris, and to become the author of a series of essays, which served for many years as the most agreeable introduction to the elementary doctrines and the ordinary processes of chemistry. He obtained from the government, by proper representations, a salary of £100 a year for himself, and for all future professors. He also paid some attention to theoretical and practical anatomy, as having some relation to the science of chemistry. In 1767, he became one of the principal tutors of Trinity College; in 1769, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in October 1771, he unexpectedly obtained the important and lucrative appointment of regius professor of divinity, upon the premature death of Dr Rutherford, and in that capacity he held the rectory of Somersham in Huntingdonshire. He had been little accustomed to the study of the divinity of the schools, or even of the fathers; but his eloquence and ingenuity supplied the want of theological learning, though he gave some offence to his more orthodox colleagues, by confining his arguments more strictly to the text of the scripture than they thought perfectly consistent with the duty of a champion of the church of England, which they considered to be the description of a professor of divinity in an English university. He attracted, however, as long as he officiated in person, audiences as numerous, to the exercises in the schools at which he presided, as had attended his chemical lectures.
He married, in December 1773, Miss Wilson of Dallam Tower in Westmoreland. Their union continued uninterrupted for more than forty years. In 1774 he obtained a prebend of Ely, in exchange for a rectory in Wales, which the duke of Grafton had procured for him; and he became archdeacon of Ely in January 1780: in the same year Bishop Keene presented him with the rectory of Northwold in Norfolk; and in 1782, his pupil, the duke of Rutland, gave him the rectory of Knappford in Leicestershire: the same interest obtained him also from Lord Shelburne the bishopric of Landaff. Here his episcopal preferment rested. He generally joined the politics of the opposition, and especially on the question of the unlimited regency; but he was too independent in his sentiments to become a very useful member of any administration; and he retired, before the end of the year 1789, without books, and with somewhat more of disgust than he ought in justice to have felt, to an estate which he had bought at Calgarth, on the banks of Winandermere, and occupied himself entirely, besides the education of his family, in agricultural improvements, especially in planting, for which he received a medal from the Society of Arts in 1789. His pupil, Mr Luther of Ongar in Essex, had died in 1786, and left him an estate, which he afterwards sold for something more than £20,000.
He considered as one of the best practical results of his chemical studies, the suggestion which he made to the duke of Richmond, then master of the ordnance, respecting the preparation of charcoal for gunpowder, by burning the wood in close vessels, which, it seems, very materially improved the quality of the powder.
He had the liberality to confer, in 1804, a small living, as a reward for literary merit only, on Mr Davies, the author of the Celtic Researches. The next year, he applied with success to the duke of York for the promotion of his son, who had then the rank of a major; and his royal highness speedily complied with his solicitation, as a personal favour only, without waiting for any ministerial influence.
His health had been seriously impaired by an illness which attacked him in 1781, and which his friends attributed, though perhaps without sufficient reason, to excessive study. In October 1809, he had a slight paralytic affection, and another in 1811; but it was in 1813 that his last illness might be said to begin, and he sunk gradually till the 4th of July 1816. The elder of his two sons was in the army, the younger in the church: he left also several daughters. His writings are as miscellaneous as they are numerous, but none of them are bulky.
21. An Apology for the Bible, in a series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine. Lond. 1796, 12mo. An able and judicious answer to the contemptible work of a mischievous incendiary: it seems to have been singularly successful in producing clear and moral conviction. Thanks were returned to the author from Ireland and from America, and he gained £1000 by the sale of the book, besides allowing it to be often reprinted gratuitously.
22. An Address to the People of Great Britain. 1798, 8vo. Enforcing the necessity of submission to the exigencies of the time. It went through fourteen editions, besides several piracies; and was reprinted in Ireland by order of Lord Camden, then Lord Lieutenant. Mr Wakefield answered it somewhat intemperately, and the bishop attempted ineffectually, out of respect for classical requirements, to lighten the punishment which was allotted to him.
23. Charge to the Clergy of Landaff. 31. Second Charge, 1802. On similar subjects.
24. A Charge relating to Ecclesiastical Reform, 1802.
25. A Sermon preached at the London Hospital, 1802. Against the principles of Paine.
26. Thoughts on the intended Invasion, 8vo.
27. Substance of a Speech intended to have been delivered, 1803. In favour of Catholic Emancipation.
28. Sermon preached before the Society for the Suppression of Vice, 1804.
29. A Charge to the Clergy, 1805. 38. Another Charge, on the Catholic Question, 1808.
30. Two Apologies, two Sermons, and a Charge. 1806, 8vo. Reprinted.
31. A second Defence of Revealed Religion, 1807. In two sermons, preached in the Chapel Royal.
32. A Paper on Planting and on Waste Land. Communication to the Board of Agriculture, vol. vii. 1808, 4to. 42. He had also written some Preliminary Observations in the Agricultural Report of Westmoreland.
33. Miscellaneous Tracts. Lond. 1815. 2 vols. 8vo. Religious, political, and agricultural. "His discourse on the first and second Adam, and the nature of death as affected by each, is almost unequalled in originality of thought and vigour of expression." Quarterly Review.
(a) It has been said that he published some papers in the Manchester Memoirs; but they do not appear in the indices.
34. Anecdotes of the Life of Richard Watson, Bishop of Landaff, written by himself at different times, and revised in 1814. Published by his son Richard Watson, LL. B. Prebendary of Landaff and Wells. Lond. 1817, 4to. 1818, 2 vols. 8vo. Quarterly Review, xviii. p. 229. Treated with great ability, but with too much severity. His chief mistake indeed seems to have been that he expected his literary merits alone to secure him political advancement; further than this, there is nothing disgusting to a candid reader, in the sincerity with which he displays the consciousness of his own merits. The praises of the reviewer himself are at least as energetic as those of the friends whose language he has occasionally copied; his censures are not less impulsive; but for an author's censure of himself, it would be idle to look in a work of autobiography.
Though somewhat reserved, Dr Watson is said to have been remarkable for the simplicity of his manners and the equality of his temper. With respect to his conduct in the school of divinity, the reviewer confesses that "he ascended the chair with many eminent qualifications for his difficult and distinguished functions. The exercise of four years, as moderator of the philosophical school, had rendered his faculty of speaking Latin perfectly easy; by great assiduity, the vices of his early education had been so far corrected that a false quantity was never heard to escape him; all the tricks and shifts of school logic were familiar to his mind, in addition to which, his acuteness and ingenuity were admirable. His majestic and commanding figure, his terrific countenance, his deep sonorous voice, the uninterrupted tenor of his sentences, which, though far from classical, were never either barbarous or soliloquistic, and, above all, the boldness and originality of his sentiments, seldom left the under-graduates' places unoccupied in the theological school. It was sport to see how the grave professor would glide over the surface of the subject with every appearance of profundity, or when pinned, as his opponent hoped, into a corner, would wind himself out with all the lubricity of an eel. Still he had large mind; he endured, he encouraged, he delighted in the opposition of able men; he never flinched from the strokes of those who had more information than himself, secure in the consciousness of his equality to encounter learning by invention. The same tolerance of contradiction, the same dexterity in parrying attacks, he brought with him into private conversation, which rendered him, when the poison of politics did not operate on his constitution, a
most agreeable and amusing debater. In these happier hours, and they were not few, he would even smile at the pomp and magnificence of his own manner, and relax into all the playfulness and pleasantry which are almost inseparable from real genius."
Our critic appears, however, to have exceeded the limits of candour and of charity, when he asserts that "he was governed through life by the two leading principles of interest and ambition, both of which were thwarted in his political conduct, by a temper so wayward, and a presumption so overweening, that the disappointment produced by their collision embittered his mind, and exasperated his latter days to a very high degree of malignity. Accomplished as he was in academical learning, he had no ingenuous or disinterested love of knowledge: he read only that he might teach, and he taught only that he might rise."
"When he felt himself neglected, he avowedly and professedly abandoned all study, because, says he, 'eagerness in the pursuit of knowledge was a part of my temper till, and only till, the acquisition of knowledge was attended with nothing but the neglect of the king and his ministers.' Disgusted, therefore, and disappointed, as much as broken in constitution, he withdrew into the wilds of Westmoreland without a library, and to this privation he voluntarily submitted almost thirty years. From taste he derived neither amusement nor occupation, for of taste he never had a tincture; placed amidst the most delicious scenes of England, he thought of nothing but turning his own portion of them to enolument!" Thus "this violent declaimer against sinecures and non-residence was the first who converted the regius professorship of divinity into a sinecure: this enemy of pluralities held at least fourteen places of preferment; this man of moderation in his wishes, and calm contentment, under the shade of retirement, spent the last twenty-nine years of his life in 'excruciating' [complaining of] those who, for his factious obstinacy, had left him to that retirement, while he was occupied in nursing up a fortune, till, according to his own boast, with the poorest bishopric in the kingdom, he became the richest bishop upon the bench."
With respect to the merits of the question between him and the administration of his early friend Mr Pitt, there will probably be as many different opinions as there are readers of different political parties; but he had surely no right to expect that a ministry determined to support every minute article of the established constitution of the country, both in church and in state, should voluntarily add to the power and authority of a person who had repeatedly declared himself rather hostile than indifferent to many points which they thought essential to both; or even of one who felt so decided a conviction of the importance of every single opinion which he had himself adopted, as to refuse his concurrence in such measures of legislation as they might deem of vital importance to the good of the country, and such as had been sanctioned by the concurrent determination of the majority of a cabinet taking on themselves the whole responsibility of their proceedings. He must have been aware that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that the members of every administration, in a country not despotic, must consent to give up something to each other's feelings, and to make a small sacrifice of private conviction for the great objects of public energy and unanimity. (L. L.)