ROBERT, an eminent minister of the Baptist denomination in the last century, was born at Swaffham in Norfolk, January 8, 1735. His father, Michael Robinson, was an officer in the excise, and led a profligate life. His mother, whose maiden name was Mary Wilkin, was a woman of superior intelligence and piety. In her early days she must have possessed much personal beauty, for her son describes her as "having at ninety the complexion and vivacity proper to seventeen." She endured with exemplary patience her father's harshness, and her husband's dissoluteness, and was thrown by both on her own resources to support herself and her family. Robert was her youngest son, and, to use her own words, "grew up a pretty scholar." His parents left Swaffham when he was seven years old, and he had then been learning Latin a year and a half, much to his master's satisfaction, who declared that he never knew a child with such a capacity.

At Scarning, their next place of residence, was an endowed grammar school, to which Mary Robinson, by taking in needle-work and keeping a lodging-house (her worthless husband having absconded), was enabled to send her son; among his school-fellows was Thurlow, afterwards lord chancellor. Robert's attainments in classical learning and French were above the average, but unfortunately the mathematics, and even common arithmetic, were not taught. As he had not the means of going to college, or entering a profession, he was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a hair-dresser in London, who took him without a premium. We are told of him at this time that he was more employed in reading than in working, in hearing noted preachers than in attending customers; but his master treated him with liberality and kindness, and having the sense to perceive that he was fitted for a higher calling, returned his indentures before his apprenticeship expired. He was in the practice of early rising to pursue his studies,—an invaluable habit which he inherited from his mother, who at the age of eighty and upwards rose regularly at four. In later life he injured himself by night studies, and boasted that he was master of the twenty-four hours. Nature, however, resented this infringement of her rights, and his constitution was broken and hastening to decay at the comparatively early age of fifty-four.

Dr Gill among the Dissenters, and Mr Romaine in the Established Church, were his favourite preachers—but he always regarded George Whitefield as his spiritual father, and in the early part of his religious profession ranked himself among his followers. He appears to have entertained the idea of being a preacher when only nineteen, and, in order to acquire facility of expression, used occasionally to preach for an hour together in his own room to himself. He preached to a numerous auditory in the Tabernacle at Norwich, and at other places in the neighbourhood. After a while, he left the Calvinistic Methodists, and with thirteen other persons formed a congregational church in the parish of St Paul, Norwich, and became their settled pastor. Having renounced Pedobaptism, he was invited to a Baptist congregation at Cambridge in 1769, and, after a trial of two years, became their pastor in the spring of 1761. In a worldly point of view, his prospects were the reverse of flattering. He had not received above ten guineas from his own family for some years; his maternal grandfather had cut him off with a legacy of half-a-crown; his wife (for he was now a married man) brought him only £100, and his first half-year's salary was under £4. Besides, the congregation, through the misconduct of many of its former members, had acquired a bad character. "These," he said, "would have been inconsiderable inconveniences to any older and a wiser man, but he was a boy and the love of his flock cost him a million to him." He preached twice, sometimes three times, every Sunday at Cambridge, and during the week at one or other of sixteen villages in the neighbourhood. In a few years a new and commodious meeting-house was erected; members of the university were attracted to it, and attendance at the dissenting chapel became a pleasant lounge for the undergraduates; some of them, however, behaved so indecorously as seriously to annoy the congregation, and on one occasion obliged it to disperse without concluding the service. A memorial was addressed to their tutor, and an acknowledgment was inserted by the chief offender in the newspapers. But a more sever chastisement was inflicted by Robinson himself in "A Lecture on the Meaning Bible-long, Bellis-long, Pamphlets," delivered on Sunday evening, January 10, 1763, and afterwards published. His "speech" on this occasion certainly did not "distil like the dew," but fell on the head of the culprits like a shower of molten lead. "Take this sentence as a specimen—'Should that question, sometimes put up in the schools, he ever put up in a circle of ladies, Detur cursum (is there an empty place in nature?) they would be provoked to answer, Detur. It is in the brain of him who behoves ill at divine worship.'" In 1773 he removed from the village of Hanxton—where, before he left, he had nine children, a wife, and an aged mother to support—to Chesterton, 2 miles from Cambridge. Here he at first hired, and in 1775 purchased a house; gradually he acquired land enough to carry on a business, and farmed with considerable profit; these proceedings he was enabled to make partly by the proceeds of his literary labours, and partly by the generous aid of one or two ardent admirers. He scouted the notion of its being a violation of clerical propriety to engage in secular pursuits—"Godly boodles," he would say, "too idle many of them to work, too ignorant to give instruction, and too conceited to study, spending all their time in talking and mischief,—are these the men to direct my conduct, to ensure my industry?"

Robinson began his literary career at Hanxton by publishing a specimen of a translation of Saurin's Sermons. The first volume appeared in 1773, and was followed by three others. In 1784 a new edition was published, with an additional volume. His Plea for the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ was very favourably received, and procured the author many compliments from dignitaries in the Establishment. Offers were made to him of preferment in the church, which he modestly but firmly rejected. When asked by Dr Ogden, "Do the dissenters know the worth of the man?" his answer was, "The man knows the worth of the dissenters." In 1774 he published, anonymously, a series of letters entitled Arcana, or the Principles of the late Petitioners to Parliament for Relief in the matter of Subscription, which increased his reputation among the Nonconformists. Two smaller works, The History and Mystery of Good Friday, and a Plan of Lectures on Nonconformity, were widely circulated, and soon passed through several editions. These were followed by a translation of Claude's Essay on the Composition of a Sermon, with a clever dissertation, and a body of very curious notes. For this he received L400. Besides various single sermons and pamphlets, he published a volume of Seventeen Discourses on several Texts of Scripture, addressed to Christian Assemblies in Villages near Cambridge, to which are added Six Morning Exercises. They are marked by great originality and ingenuity; and if they have not preserved the popularity which they at first obtained, it may perhaps be accounted for by their ambiguousness and vacillation in doctrinal statement, which became a characteristic of the author, and increased to the close of his life. Symptoms of this may be found even in his Plea; and it is the opinion of his biographer, that at the time of writing this treatise he was not clear from embarrassment on the very thesis he had undertaken to defend. In 1781 Robinson was requested by a number of the leading Baptists in London to write a history of the denomination, and arrangements were made for his visiting London every month, in order to consult books and manuscripts at the British Museum, of which Dr Gifford, a Baptist minister, was then sub-librarian; but after making the experiment, he found that he could carry on his researches more easily at home. From that time to his death he devoted himself to the undertaking with an intensity of application that no doubt shortened his days. In order to acquire information for this and another historical work, he studied Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch.

His History of Baptism, a quarto volume of above 650 pages, was published a few weeks after his death, and one of his last letters refers to a correction of the proof-sheets. His Ecclesiastical Researches, a quarto volume of about the same size, was published by subscription (like the former) in 1792.

For some months previous to his death Robinson had been in a declining state, prostrated both in body and mind. On Wednesday, June 2, 1790, he set off from Chesterton on a visit to Dr Priestley, and, travelling by slow stages, arrived in Birmingham on Saturday evening. In a letter to a friend he had said, "On the 9th I proceed forward; on the 19th I hope to be at home." On reaching Birmingham he said to a person who called upon him, "You are only come to see the shadow of Robert Robinson." Yet he ventured to preach for the dissenters' charity schools twice on the Sunday. Dr Priestley was charmed with his conversation, but confessed himself much disappointed with his preaching. "His discourse," Dr Priestley said, "was unconnected and desultory, and his manner of treating the Trinity favoured rather of burlesque than of serious reasoning. He attacked orthodoxy more pointedly and sarcastically than I ever did in my life." He had often expressed a wish "to die softly, suddenly, and alone." On Tuesday the 9th of June, the very day on which he had intended to "proceed forward," he was found dead in his bed, neither his clothes discomposed nor his features distorted.

A collected edition of his miscellaneous works, with a memoir by Mr Benjamin Flower, was published in 4 vols. 8vo in 1807, and a volume of posthumous works, by the same editor, in 1812; and his Village Sermons were reprinted in 1805 and 1808. For the facts in this article we are chiefly indebted to George Dyer's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Robert Robinson, London, 1796. In Coleridge's Notes, Theological, Political, and Miscellaneous, London, 1853, are some remarks on Robinson's Plea, and other treatises (p. 112-126).