(George), the celebrated bishop of Cloyne, was the son of a clergyman in Ireland, distinguished only by his piety and learning. He was educated at Trinity college in Dublin, of which he attained a fellowship. His first essays as a writer were published in the Spectator and Guardian, which entertaining works he adorned with many pieces in favour of virtue and religion. His learning and virtues, his wit and agreeable conversation, introduced him to the acquaintance, and procured him the esteem and friendship, of many great and learned men; and among others the Earl of Peterborough, Dr Swift, and Mr Pope. The Earl made him his chaplain, and took him as his companion on a tour through Europe. During his absence, he was elected a senior fellow of his college; and created D.D. per saltum, in 1717.

Upon his return, his acquaintance among the great was extended. Lord Burlington, in particular, conceived a great esteem for him on account of his great taste and skill in architecture; an art of which his Lordship was an excellent judge and patron, and which Mr Berkeley had made his particular study while in Italy. By this nobleman he was recommended to the Duke of Grafton lord lieutenant of Ireland, who took him over to Ireland in 1721, after he had been absent from his native country more than five years. In 1722, his fortune received a considerable increase from a very unexpected event. On his first going to London in the year 1713, Dean Swift introduced him to the family of Mrs Esther Vanhomrigh (the celebrated Vanessa), and took him often to dine at her house. Some years before her death, this lady removed to Ireland, and fixed her residence at Cell-bridge, a pleasant village in the neighbourhood of Dublin, most probably with a view of often enjoying the company of a man for whom she seems to have entertained a very singular attachment. But finding herself totally disappointed in this expectation, and discovering the Dean's connection with Stella, she was so enraged at this infidelity, that she altered her intention of making him her heir, and left the whole of her fortune, amounting to near £800l., to be divided equally between two gentlemen whom she named her executors; Mr Marshal a lawyer, afterwards one of the judges of the court of common pleas in Ireland, and Dr Berkeley. The Doctor received the news of this bequest from Mr Marshal with great surprize, as he had never once seen the lady who had honoured him with such a proof of her esteem from the time of his return to Ireland to her death. In 1724, the Doctor resigned his fellowship; being promoted by his patron the Duke of Grafton to the deanery of Derry, worth £100l. per annum. In the Berkeley interval between this removal and his return from abroad, his mind had been employed in conceiving a most benevolent and charitable plan for the better supplying of the churches in our foreign plantations, and converting the savage Americans to Christianity, by erecting a college in the Summer Islands. The proposal was well received; and he obtained a charter for the foundation, with a parliamentary grant of £20,000, toward carrying it into execution: but he could never get the money; so that, after two years stay in America on this business, the design dropped. He was warmly engaged too, in concert with Swift, Bolingbroke, and others, in a scheme for establishing a society for the improvement of the English language, in imitation of the academy of France. But Harley, the great patron of it, falling from power, this design too proved abortive. In 1728, the Dean entered into a marriage with Anne, the eldest daughter of the Right Honourable John Forster, Esq; speaker of the Irish house of commons.

In the year 1734, he was advanced from the deanery of Derry to the bishopric of Cloyne, where he distinguished himself by pastoral vigilance and constant residence; and at once endeared himself to his people, by promoting their temporal and spiritual happiness. He endeavoured by all means to raise a spirit of industry, and propagate the arts of cultivation and agriculture in that neglected country.

The earl of Chesterfield, when he was lord lieutenant of Ireland, offered him a richer see; but he declined it, saying, his neighbours and he loved one another, and he could not think of forming new connections in his old days, and tearing himself from those friends whose kindness to him was his greatest happiness. In 1752, however, finding the infirmities of age come upon him, and that he was unable to discharge the functions of his office, he retired to Oxford, there to spend the remainder of his days in conversation with learned men, and to superintend the education of one of his sons: And that the revenues of the church might not be misapplied, nor the interests of religion suffer by his absence from his diocese, he made great interest for leave to resign his bishopric, and to obtain in lieu of it a canonry of Christ-church. Failing of success in this, he actually wrote over to the secretary of state, to request that he might have permission to resign his bishopric, worth at that time at least £1,400 per annum. So uncommon a petition excited his Majesty's curiosity to enquire who was the extraordinary man that preferred it: being told that it was his old acquaintance Dr Berkeley, he declared that he should die a bishop in spite of himself, but gave him full liberty to reside where he pleased. The bishop's last act before he left Cloyne was to sign a lease of the demesne lands in that neighbourhood, to be renewed yearly at the rent of £200, which sum he directed to be distributed every year, until his return, among poor house-keepers of Cloyne, Youghal, and Aghadda. At Oxford he lived highly respected by the learned members of that great university, till the hand of Providence unexpectedly deprived them of the pleasure and advantages derived from his residence among them. On Sunday evening, January 14th 1753, as he was sitting in the midst... midst of his family, listening to a sermon of Dr Sherlock's which his lady was reading to him, he was seized with what the physicians termed a palsy in the heart, and instantly expired. The accident was so sudden, that his body was quite cold, and his joints stiff, before it was discovered; as the bishop lay on a couch, and seemed to be asleep, till his daughter, on presenting him with a dish of tea, first perceived his insensibility. His remains were interred at Christ-church, Oxford, where there is an elegant marble monument erected to his memory by his lady, who had during her marriage brought him three sons and one daughter. As to his person, he was a handsome man, with a countenance full of meaning and benignity, remarkable for great strength of limbs, and till his sedentary life impaired it, of a very robust constitution. He was however often troubled with the hypochondria, and latterly with a nervous choleric. Mr Pope sums up his character in one line: After he has mentioned some particular virtues that characterize other prelates, he ascribes

To Berkeley ev'ry virtue under heav'n.

An admirable description is given of him in the following anecdote. Bishop Atterbury, having heard much of Mr Berkeley, wished to see him. Accordingly he was one day introduced to that prelate by the Earl of Berkeley. After some time, Mr Berkeley quitted the room: on which Lord Berkeley said to the Bishop, "Does my cousin answer your Lordship's expectations?" The Bishop, lifting up his hands in astonishment, replied, "So much understanding, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels, till I saw this gentleman." His knowledge is said to have even extended to the minutest objects, and included the arts and business of common life. Thus Dr Blackwell, in his Memoirs of the Court of Augustus, having made an observation, "that the ingenious mechanic, the workers in stone and metal, and improvers in trade, agriculture, and navigation, ought to be searched out and conversed with, no less than the professors of speculative science," adds the following eulogium on our prelate: "In this respect I would with pleasure do justice to the memory of a very great though singular sort of a man, Dr Berkeley, better known as a philosopher, and intended founder of an university in the Bermudas, or Summer Islands, than as bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. An inclination to carry me out on that expedition, as one of the young professors, on his new foundation, having brought us often together, I scarce remember to have conversed with him on that art, liberal or mechanic, of which he knew not more than the ordinary practitioners. With the widest views, he descended into a minute detail, and begrudged neither pains nor expense for the means of information. He travelled through a great part of Sicily on foot; clambered over the mountains and crept into the caverns to investigate its natural history, and discover the causes of its volcanoes: and I have known him sit for hours in forgeries and foundries to inspect their successive operations. I enter not into his peculiarities either religious or personal: but admire the extensive genius of the man, and think it a loss to the western world that his noble and exalted plan of an American university was not carried into execution. Berkeley. Many such spirits in our country would quickly make learning wear another face."

He published many ingenious works, particularly The Principles of Human Knowledge, the singular notions in which gave rise to much controversy: A new theory of vision: Alciphron, or the minute philosopher; one of the most elegant and genteel defences of that religion which he was born to vindicate both by his virtues and his ingenuity: and Siris, or a Treatise on tar-water, which, under his sanction, became for a while a very popular medicine. In the Gentleman's Magazine for January 1777, it is said that the Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca, have generally been attributed to bishop Berkeley; and we have observed that this work is ascribed to him by the book-sellers in their printed catalogues. It is a beautiful Utopian Romance, which was published between 30 and 40 years ago, and hath gone through several editions. What external evidence there is for its having been written by our ingenious prelate we cannot say; but we think that the book itself affords no internal evidence to the contrary. There are no sentiments in it but what might be supposed to come from Dr Berkeley, allowing for the costume necessary to be preserved in the work, according to the plan upon which it is formed. The beauty and singularity of imagination displayed in it, and the philanthropy and humanity with which it abounds, are perfectly suitable to the bishop's character. The mode of government delineated in the Romance is agreeable to his ideas. It is the patriarchal, and represented as being admirably contrived for promoting the general happiness. The description, in particular, of the European discovered in the southern wilds of Africa, and of his atrocious conduct, as arising from his being a modern free-thinker, is quite in Berkeley's style of thinking.