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 sizar 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 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 Rutherforth, 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 Westmorland. 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 Knaptoft 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 sank 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.

Institutionum Chemicarum per Metallurgiam, Camb. 1768, 8vo.