, a learned dissenting teacher, was born near Lancaster in 1694,
, a learned dissenting teacher, was born
near Lancaster in 1694, and educated at Whitehaven. He
settled first at Kirksteadin Lincolnshire, where he preached
to a very small congregation, and '.aught a grammar school
for the support of his family, near twenty years; but in
1733, his merit in this obscure situation being known, he
was unanimously chosen by a presbyterian congregation at
Norwich, where he preached many years, and avowed his
sentiments to be hostile to the Trinitarian doctrine. From
this city he was, in <757, invited to Warrington in Lancashire, to superintend an academy formed there; being
judged the fittest person to give this new institution a proper dignity and reputation in the world. With this invitation, which was warmly and importunately enforced, he
complied; but some differences about precedency and authority, as well as some disputes about the principles of
morals, soon involved, and almost endangered, the very
being of the academy, and subjected him to such treatment
as he often said, “would shorten his days:
” and so it
proved. He had a very good constitution, which he had
preserved by temperance, but it was now undermined by a
complication of disorders. “The last time I saw him,
”
says Dr. Harwood, “he bitterly lamented his unhappy situation, and his being rendered (all proper authority, as a tutor, being taken from him) utterly incapable of being
any longer useful, said his life was not any object of desire
to him, when his public usefulness was no more; and repeated with great emotion some celebrated lines to this
purpose out of Sophocles.
”