John Horne Tooke (1736-1812). Library of Literary Criticism. 1901-05

John Horne Tooke (1736-1812). Library of Literary Criticism. 1901-05 Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record Charles Wells Moulton, ed.  Library of Literary Criticism.  1901–05. John Horne Tooke (1736–1812) Born [John Horne; adopted additional name of Tooke in 1782 as a compliment to a patron] at Westminster, 25 June 1736. Early educations at schools in Soho and in Kent. At Westminster School, 1744–46; at Eton, 1746–53. Matric. St. John’s Coll., Camb., 1755; B.A., 1758; M.A., 1771. Ordained Vicar of New Brentford in 1760; but gave up orders in 1773, and took up pursuit of law. Imprisoned for libel, 1777–78. Tried on charge of high treason, but acquitted, 1794. M.P. for Old Sarum, Feb. 1801 to 1802. Died, at Wimbledon, 18 March 1812. Buried at Ealing. Works: “The Petition of an Englishman” (anon.), 1765; “A Sermon,” 1769; “An Oration delivered at a … Meeting of the Freeholders of Middlesex” [1770]; “Letter to John Dunning, Esq.,” 1778; “Letter to Lord Ashburton,” 1782; “Ἐπεα Πτεροεντα,” 1786; “Letter to a Friend on the Reported Marriage of the Prince of Wales,” 1787; “Two Pair of Portraits,” 1788; “Letter on the Meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern,” 1791; “Proceedings in an Action for Debt,” 1792; “Letter on Parliamentary Reform,” 1794; “Speeches … during the Westminster Election, 1796” [1796]; “Letter to the Editor of ‘The Times,’” 1807. Life, by J. A. Graham, 1828.—Sharp, R. Farquharson, 1897, A Dictionary of English Authors, p. 281.    

1 Personal

  There is abundance of proof that Mr. Horne was now considered an admirable preacher, and that his eloquence only wanted cultivation to place him among the most successful of our English divines. But it was in orthodox and doctrinal discourses that he chiefly excelled, and he is accordingly reported to have distinguished himself greatly by his exhortations before confirmation, on which occasion, by mingling sound argument with kind and affectionate persuasion, he never failed to make a suitable impression on all who heard him. In short, he might not only have been greatly respected as a popular pastor, but was still in a fair way to become one of the pillars of the Anglican church, when a memorable event occurred in the political world, and proved an insurmountable, though not, perhaps, an unexpected obstacle to his future preferment.—Stephens, Alexander, 1813, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke.    

2   It would be but impertinent, however, to effect to call such a character as that of John Horne Tooke to account for this or the other particular culpability. It would be something like attending to criticize the transactions of a pagan temple, and excepting to one rite as ungraceful, perhaps, and to another practice as irreverent; like as if the substance of the service were of a quality to deserve that its particular parts should be corrected. His whole moral constitution was unsound, from the exclusion … of all respect to a future account, to be given to the Supreme Governor. Towards the conclusion of his life, he made calm and frequent references to his death, but not a word is here recorded expressive of anticipations beyond it.—Foster, John, 1813, Horne Tooke, Critical Essays, ed. Ryland, vol. II, p. 191.    

3   Mr. Horne Tooke was one of those who may be considered as connecting links between a former period and the existing generation. His education and accomplishments, nay, his political opinions, were of the last age; his mind, and the tone of his feeling were modern. There was a hard, dry materialism in the very texture of his understanding, varnished over by the external refinement of the old school. Mr. Tooke had great scope of attainments, and great versatility of pursuits; but the same shrewdness, quickness, cool self-possession, the same literalness of perception, the absence of passion and enthusiasm, characterised nearly all he did, said or wrote. He was without a rival (almost) in private conversation, an expert public speaker, a keen politician, a first-rate grammarian, and the finest gentleman (to say the least) of his own party. He had no imagination (or he would not have scorned it!)—no delicacy of taste, no rooted prejudices or strong attachments: his intellect was like a bow of polished steel, from which he shot sharp-pointed poisoned arrows at his friends in private, at his enemies in public. His mind (so to speak) had no religion in it, and very little even of the moral qualities of genius; but he was a man of the world, a scholar bred, and a most acute and powerful logician. He was also a wit and a formidable one: yet it may be questioned whether his wit was anything more than an excess of his logical faculty: it did not consist in the play of fancy, but in close and cutting combinations of the understanding.—Hazlitt, William, 1825, The Spirit of the Age.    

4   While the compositions of Junius have furnished a model of style, as bold and brilliant as it is classical, the Author has eluded discovery, and to this moment, as if disdaining applause, the motto emblazoned on the escutcheon of his fame, applies, “Stat nominis umbra.” This, it must be admitted, is an appalling circumstance, not only checking ambition, but assailing the enquirer at the entrance; like some ancient sepulchral inscription, at once rebuking the curiosity of the profane intruder, and sternly prohibiting his further advance. Knowing, however, that the avenues to the temple of truth are ever open, and that its votaries are not to be deterred from fair and manly discussion, the Author of the following Essay has ventured upon a disclosure of facts and circumstances, which will not suffer himself, at least, to doubt as to the identity of JUNIUS. He had the honor of the acquaintance of JOHN HORNE TOOKE; and from the opportunities which this afforded, aided by other circumstances, he has been enabled to furnish facts hitherto unknown; and to present others in a light so new, as to induce a probability that TOOKE and JUNIUS are the same.—Graham, John A., 1828, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke, together with His Valuable Speeches and Writings; also containing Proofs Identifying Him as the Author of the Celebrated Letters of Junius, Preface, p. v.    

5   Horne Tooke was always making a butt of Mr. Godwin; who nevertheless, had that in him which Tooke could never have understood. I saw a good deal of Tooke at one time: he left upon me the impression of his being a keen, iron man.—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1830, Table Talk, ed. Ashe, May 8, p. 72.    

6   I often dined with Tooke at Wimbledon; and always found him most pleasant and most witty. There his friends would drop in upon him without any invitation: Colonel Bosville would come frequently, bringing with him a dinner from London,—fish, &c.—Tooke latterly used to expect two or three of his most intimate friends to dine with him every Sunday; and I once offended him a great deal by not joining his Sunday dinner-parties for several weeks.—Rogers, Samuel, 1855, Recollections of Table-Talk, ed. Dyce.    

7   Had, for many years been the dread of judges, ministers of State, and all constituted authorities. He was that famous Parson Horne who attacked the terrible Junius, after statesmen, judges, and generals had fled before him, and drove him back defeated and howling with his wounds. He it was who silenced Wilkes. Some years afterwards he fastened a quarrel on the House of Commons, which he bullied and baffled with his usual coolness and address.—Massey, William, 1855–63, A History of England During the Reign of George the Third.    

8   Tooke’s change of name originated as follows. When he was rising into celebrity, the estate of Purley, near Croydon, belonged to Mr. William Tooke, one of four friends who joined in supplying him with an income, when, after quitting the Church, he studied for the Law. One of Tooke’s richer neighbours, in wresting from him his manorial rights by a lawsuit, had applied to Parliament, and nearly succeeded in effecting his purpose by means of an inclosure bill, which would have greatly depreciated the Purley estate. Tooke despondingly confided his apprehensions to Horne, who resolved at once to avert the blow, which he did in a very bold and very singular manner. The third reading of the Bill was to take place the next day, and Horne immediately wrote a violent libel on the Speaker of the House of Commons, in reference to it, and obtained its insertion in the Public Advertiser. As might be expected, the first Parliamentary proceeding the next day was the appearance of the adventurous libeller in the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms. When called upon for his defence, he delivered a most remarkable speech, in which he pointed out the injustice of the Bill in question with so much success, that it was reconsidered, and the clauses which affected his friend’s property expunged. In gratitude for his important service, Mr. Tooke, who had no family, made Horne his heir; and on his death in 1803, the latter became proprietor of Purley as one of the conditions of inheritance, he added the name of Tooke to his own, and from this time was known as John Horne Tooke.—Timbs, John, 1860, A Century of Anecdote, p. 177.    

9   John Horne had a great and varied reputation while he lived, and long enough afterwards to be honoured with the most florid, and far from the least amusing, of those biographies of sixty years ago, which were adulatory, but never uncandid; absurd, but never dull. There we learn that though, like Pericles, he rarely laughed, like Alcibiades he could suit himself to the humors of other men; that he could enjoy his wine with Homer and Ennius, could draw a character with Tacitus, and was as ready to accept money from his friends as Pliny and Cicero; that during his career he was as artful in counsel as Ulysses, as cool in action as the Duke of Marlborough, and as self-confident as Michael Angelo; and that, when the end came, he was as ready to die, and as desirous to have a simple funeral, as Titus Pomponius Atticus. But, in truth, his character and powers were not of the heroic order; and the people who had parallel histories and similar dispositions with Horne were to be found in his own country and his own half-century. He was the earliest, and for practical business by far the ablest, of a class of men to whom Englishmen owe a debt of gratitude which they are, not inexcusably, somewhat unwilling to acknowledge. Among the most lamentable results of a system of coercion and repression is the deteriorating effect which it produces upon those who brave it. When to speak or write one’s mind on politics is to obtain the reputation, and render one’s self liable to the punishment, of a criminal, social discredit, with all its attendant moral dangers, soon attaches itself to the more humble opponents of a ministry…. Honest, impracticable, insatiably contentious, and inordinately vain, he had thrown away almost all his chances and his friends.—Trevelyan, George Otto, 1880, The Early History of Charles James Fox, pp. 439, 441.    

10   The man who appears to have contributed most largely to its formation was Horne, the Vicar of Brentford, afterwards better known as Horne Tooke, who had now thrown aside the clerical profession, for which he was utterly unsuited, and flung himself unreservedly into political agitation. The great contributions to grammar and the science of language which have given him a permanent place in English literature belong to a later period of his life, and at this time he was known chiefly as one of the most violent agitators among the City politicians. He possessed some literary and still greater forensic ability, and was a man of undoubted energy, courage, honesty, and independence, but at the same time turbulent, vain, and quarrelsome, and very unscrupulous about the means he employed.—Lecky, William Edward Hartpole, 1882, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, vol. III, ch. xi, p. 189.    

11 The Diversions of Purley, 1786–98–1805

  The distance between what he has proved and what he wishes us to believe that he has proved, is enormous.—Dudley, Earl of, 1812, Reed’s Memoirs of the Life of John Horne Tooke, Quarterly Review, vol. 7, p. 321.    

12   Horne Tooke’s is certainly a wonderful work; but the great merit was the original thought. The light which shines through such impenetrable words as articles and pronouns is admirable,—“the” and “it.” No single book, perhaps, ever so much illustrated language: yet, how much more might he have done, if he had known the collateral languages! Adelung’s “Dictionary” alone would have yielded great assistance.—Mackintosh, Sir James, 1812, Life, vol. II, ch. iii.    

13   The great thing which Mr. Horne Tooke has done, and which he has left behind him to posterity, is his work on Grammar, oddly enough entitled “The Diversions of Purley.” Many people have taken it up as a description of a game—others supposing it to be a novel. It is, in truth, one of the few philosophical works on Grammar that were ever written. The essence of it (and, indeed, almost all that is really valuable in it) is contained in his “Letter to Dunning,” published about the year 1775. Mr. Tooke’s work is truly elementary…. It is also a pity that Mr. Tooke spun out his great work with prolix and dogmatical dissertations on irrelevant matters; and after denying the old metaphysical theories of language, should attempt to found a metaphysical theory of his own on the nature and mechanism of language.—Hazlitt, William, 1825, The Spirit of the Age.    

14   Horne Tooke was pre-eminently a ready-witted man. He had that clearness which is founded on shallowness. He doubted nothing; and, therefore, gave you all that he himself knew, or meant, with great completeness. His voice was very fine, and his tones exquisitely discriminating. His mind had no progression of development. All that is worth anything (and that is but little) in the “Diversions of Purley” is contained in a short pamphlet-letter which he addressed to Mr. Dunning; then it was enlarged to an octavo, but there was not a foot of progression beyond the pamphlet; at last, a quarto volume, I believe, came out; and yet, verily, excepting newspaper lampoons and political insinuations, there was no addition to the argument of the pamphlet. It shows a base and unpoetical mind to convert so beautiful, so divine a subject as language into the vehicle or make-weight of political squibs. All that is true in Horne Tooke’s book is taken from Lennep, who gave it for so much as it was worth, and never pretended to make a system of it. Tooke affects to explain the origin and whole philosophy of language by what is, in fact, only a mere accident of the history of one language, or one or two languages.—Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1830, Table Talk, ed. Ashe, May 7, p. 69.    

15   He has made one of the driest subjects in the whole range of literature or science one of the most amusing and even lively of books; nor did any one ever take up the “Diversions of Purley” (as he has quaintly chosen to call it) and lay it down till some other avocation tore it from his hands. The success of this system has been such as its great essential merits, and its more superficial attractions combined, might have led us to expect. All men are convinced of its truth; and as every thing which had been done before was superseded by it, so nothing has since been effected unless in pursuing its views and building upon its solid foundations.—Brougham, Henry, Lord, 1839–43, Lives of Statesmen of the Time of George III.    

16   Whatever may be Horne Tooke’s shortcomings (and they are great), whether in details of etymology, or in the philosophy of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet, with all this, what an epoch in many a student’s intellectual life has been his first acquaintance with “The Diversions of Purley.”—Trench, Richard Chenevix, 1851, On the Study of Words, Preface.    

17   It is a matter of sincere regret with all who know the real merits of Horne Tooke, that his spleen and causticity of temper should have prevented him from becoming what his talents and labors might easily have made him—the father of modern English. Darwin says very truly of him, that he first let in light upon the chaos of English etymology, and displayed the wonders of formation in language—at least in the particles. His mistaken vocation was the eternal bar to real greatness: the life-long struggle with it embittered his life and his mind, already too fond of paradox, and made him the very Ishmael of literature and politics—his hand against every man’s hand, and every man’s hand against his.—De Vere, M. Schele, 1853, Outlines of Comparative Philology, p. 192.    

18   Dire have been the disappointments incurred by the “Diversions of Purley,”—one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade over one of our best story-books, “The Diversions of Hollycot,” by the late Mrs. Johnston.—Burton, John Hill, 1860, His Functions, The Book-Hunter, pt. ii.    

19   Him who yet remains the greatest philologist that has made the English language his peculiar study, Horne Tooke.—White, Richard Grant, 1870, Words and Their Uses.    

20   The main interest of the “Diversions” to the general reader lies in the witty intermixture of political thrusts and declamations.—Minto, William, 1872–80, Manual of English Prose Literature, p. 487.    

21   The philology is eccentric and old-fashioned, and the book “diverting” to its author rather than its readers: but it is very unlike a work on which a revolutionary accused of high treason was likely to have been engaged.—Oliphant, Margaret O. W., 1882, Literary History of England, XVIIIth–XIXth Century, vol. II, p. 225.    

22   As a philologist, Horne Tooke deserves credit for seeing the necessity of studying Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, and learnt enough to be much in advance of Johnson in that direction; although his views were inevitably crude as judged by a later standard. His philology was meant to subserve a characteristic philosophy. Locke, he said, had made a happy mistake when he called his book an essay upon human understanding, instead of an essay upon grammar. Horne Tooke, in fact, was a thorough nominalist after the fashion of Hobbes; he especially ridiculed the “Hermes” of Harris, and Monboddo, who had tried to revive Aristotelean logic; held that every word meant simply a thing; and that reasoning was the art of putting words together. Some of his definitions on this principle became famous; as that truth means simply what a man “troweth,” and that right means simply what is ruled, whence it follows that right and wrong are as arbitrary as right and left, and may change places according to the legislator’s point of view.—Stephen, Leslie, 1899, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. LVII, p. 46.    

23 General

  Justice has scarcely been done to Horne, as a mob politician and political writer. With all his violence he was generally in the right; and the best testimony to his sincerity is that he withdrew from active politics when he found that he was not likely to gain attention. In these City struggles it is plain that he was “pulling the strings,” yet without any attempt to make himself conspicuous. In his appeals to the throne and the public there is an earnest ring, with a sarcastic, vigorous power, which excites admiration.—Fitzgerald, Percy, 1888, The Life and Times of John Wilkes, vol. II, p. 164.    

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