FRANCIS, was born at Edinburgh Aug. 12, 1778. His father was a merchant in that city, of sufficient wealth to give him the best education that money could at that time procure in Scotland. After passing through the ordinary courses at the High School and University of Edinburgh, he qualified himself for the bar, and began to practise with very reasonable prospects of success. His native city, however, he found too small a field for his high aspirations and wide views, and accordingly he removed in 1802 to London, where he entered himself of Lincoln's Inn, hoping to find his true sphere in Westminster Hall. The interval that elapsed between this date and his admission to the English bar in 1807, he spent in a most comprehensive course of legal and general study; and his papers in the Edinburgh Review (chiefly on subjects connected with political economy) attest the extent and variety of his reading, and the largeness and soundness of his views. Entering parliament in 1806 for St Ives in Cornwall, and in 1813 for St Mawes, he allied himself with the Whigs, and fixed the attention of England by the ability with which he discussed all the questions of political economy and finance that came before the house. On the question of freedom of trade, especially in corn, he displayed the wisdom of a philosopher, and the knowledge and foresight of a practical statesman, and anticipated by nearly half a century the principles that now regulate the commerce of Great Britain. Perhaps his crowning achievement in parliament was the part he took in the great Bullion question. He was a member of the Bullion committee, and drew up the first part of the report; and it was mainly through his exertions that the unlimited issue of paper-money by the Bank of England and the private banks of the country was stopped, and gold and silver re-established as the only legal circulating media. His parliamentary and literary labours, prosecuted with noble and disinterested zeal for many years, at length wore out a frame naturally far from robust; and in 1816, having gone to Italy in the hope of recruiting his shattered health, he died at Pisa, Feb. 8, 1817.

The most striking characteristic of Horner's mind was its comprehensiveness, a quality which shows itself as remarkably in the plan of private study which he drew up for his own guidance, while only on the threshold of manhood, as in his matured parliamentary efforts. His independence of character was shown in his adoption and manful support of a political creed, which in his early youth it was almost dangerous to profess in Scotland. In choosing this creed he was influenced neither by prejudice nor by passion, but by a simple love of what seemed to him to be the truth, and throughout life he always sought after truth for its own sake, wherever it was to be found. Few Britons of this century have gone to the grave so sincerely and so generally lamented as Horner, if we except Sir Robert Peel. His countrymen found in him a safe and powerful man, who was labouring not for himself or his party but for them. "They were convinced of his talents, they confided in his moderation, and they were sure of his motives; he had improved so quickly and so much that his early death was looked on as the destruction of a great statesman who had done but a small part of the good which might be expected from him, who would infallibly have risen to the highest offices, and as infallibly have filled them to the public good." On his private character it is hardly necessary to dilate. Integrity, gentleness, and nobility of nature are accorded to him by all that ever knew him, without one dissenting voice. Sidney Smith said of him, "the commandments were written on his face, and I have often told him there was not a crime he might not commit with impunity, as no judge or jury who saw him would ever give the smallest degree of credit to any evidence against him; there was in his look a calm settled love of all that was good and honourable—an air of wisdom and of sweetness; you saw at once that he was a great man, whom nature had intended for a leader of human beings; you ranged yourself willingly under his banners, and cheerfully submitted to his sway" (Memoirs of Francis Horner, with Selections from his Correspondence, Lond. 1843).