ANDREW, D.D., a learned and laborious compiler of the 18th century, was born at Nottingham in 1725. Sprung from a family which had given many ministers to the Established Church, but had left it on the passing of the Uniformity Act, he cast his lot with the Dissenters. On leaving the school of Sleaford, in Lincolnshire, he entered the theological academy at Northampton, then presided over by the learned and pious Dr Doddridge. The course extended over five years, and at the end of that time he obtained a charge at Boston, in Lincolnshire, where he remained from 1746 to 1750. Translated to Dorking, in Surrey, he ministered there for three years, and in 1753 became pastor of the Presbyterian church of Long Ditton, in Westminster. Among his predecessors in that charge had been the famous Calamy and the learned Hughes. Besides his ordinary professional duties, he took an active part in the temporal affairs of the religious body to which he belonged, managing the various trusts and funds with much adroitness and success. In 1763, he was appointed classical tutor in Coward's Academy, a training college for English dissenters, and held that office for upwards of twenty years. When another institution of the same kind was opened at Hackney, in 1786, he was made, very much against his will, one of the tutors. In 1778 he became a Fellow of the Antiquarian, and in the following year a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in 1795, in the seventy-first year of his age. He enjoyed all his life, and very deservedly, a high character for piety, active and unobtrusive benevolence, and all the personal virtues which endear a man to his friends and to society.

Though actively engaged in professional life, Kippis was one of the most voluminous writers of his day. He contributed largely to the Gentleman's Magazine, and the Monthly Review, at that time the leading periodicals of Great Britain, and had "a main finger" in establishing the New Annual Register, the object of which was to counterbalance the political influence of the original work of that name. But he established a more enduring claim on the regard of posterity by his edition of the Biographia Britannica. He unfortunately did not live to complete the work he had begun, which, besides, was on a scale far beyond the strength of any one editor, however able. At the time of his death he had only brought it down as far as "Faust." Many new lives were incorporated, written for the most part by the editor himself, and extensive additions and corrections made on the original text. The immense labour and research of the work, and the honest desire to reach the truth, independent of all party or personal leanings, have made it one of the best books of its kind in existence. The plan, however, is defective. Instead of fusing his corrections into the original, he reprinted the text as it stood, and threw his own corrections into the form of foot-notes, which often gives the work the air of a long controversy, and swelled it beyond all reasonable bounds. The writing, though honest and careful, and evidently the best that the writer had to give, is often languid and tamely monotonous, and unrelieved either by the graces of fancy and sentiment, or by any novelty or depth of moral reflection. The articles are also conceived in a spirit of universal benevolence, which delights to dwell on the virtues of humanity, but shrinks from boldly rebuking and denouncing its follies, its vices, and its crimes. As a mere storehouse of facts, however, the work possesses a genuine value, and has not yet been superseded. Some of Kippis's longer contributions, such as his "Life of Captain Cook," were reprinted separately. He also published a volume of sermons, and prepared a collected edition of the works of Dr Nathaniel Lardner, to which he prefixed a life of that distinguished theological scholar. He rendered a similar service to the good name of his old friend and teacher, Doddridge.