his fingers, and had nearly put his eyes out. I do not recollect at what time he entered into his employment under Mr. Kennicott, who certainly found him very well qualified for his purpose in point of ability and industry, but high spirited, turbulent, and discontented; so that, after he had been a year or two at the work of collating Hebrew manuscripts, he quarrelled with his employer, threw himself out of his work, and came with his complaints to me in the country, desiring to shew me some extracts he had made from the collations, that I might be a witness with him to the futility of the undertaking. The specimen he produced was not to the advantage of it; but it was not easy to judge, how far the fidelity of a person in an ill humour was to be depended upon. None but the collator himself could determine with precision. I advised him by all means to return to Mr. Kennicott, make his peace with him, and go on quietly with his business. Which he did; but after a perfidious manner; playing a false game between two parties; and carrying stories from the one to the other as it suited his purpose, till all his friends found a reason to be afraid of him, and Mr. Kennicott (now Dr. Kennicott) was under the necessity of dismissing him. So he left the occupation of a collator, formed a plan for forging Hebrew manuscripts, with all the appearances of antiquity, and putting them off for genuine, to shew how the world might be imposed upon. Somebody in compassion to his distress recommended him as an assistant to a charitable gentleman at a school in Bedfordshire, for which employment he was well qualified; but there also, after he had given much trouble, he miscarried. At length he got into some place of trust, which gave him an opportunity of making off with a sum of money: for, with all his ingenuity and industry, and without any

one expensive vice, yet, as if some dæmon had pursued him, so he ordered his affairs, that, having now a wife and child to maintain, he was very seldom far from beggary; whence one would hope he did some things rather from distress than malignity; though it must be owned, that upon the plea of his own wants, he could justify himself to his own conscience in any act of perfidy against the best of his benefactors; his conduct being exactly the same to his friends and his enemies, if his affairs required it. With what he had thus got he went over to Paris; where, by means of his own Hebrew papers, and some others which he had carried away with him, he had the address to introduce himself to a society of Hebrew scholars among the Capuchin Friars of St. Honoré; and amongst them all they fabricated a work, in the French language, which came over into England under the title of Lettres de M. l'Abbé de * **Ex-professeur en Hébreu en l'Université de *** au Sr. Kennicott Anglois. It has Rome in the title, as if it had been there printed, but it was sold at Paris; and its date is 1771. This pamphlet is severe, both in its reflections and its examples, on the work of collation, so celebrated in England, that people would hear nothing against it; and I was told, that the bookseller, who traded in foreign books, refused to take this into his shop: and yet some of its assertions are but to the same effect with those of Mr. Horne in his View; the substance of which the reader may see from the quotation in the margin. This

* Il ne restera pas un seul mot dans la Bible Hebraïque dont on puisse garantir la sincérité. Sentez donc les suites de votre entreprise: il n'en résultera qu'un ouvrage mal conçu, peu conforme aux regles de la saine critique, totalement inutile, et plus propre à éblouir par un vain etalage de prétendues corrections, qu'à instruire par des raisonnemens solides. P. 12.

piece was afterwards translated into English by a worthy gentleman, who was struck by its facts and arguments; and a small anonymous pamphlet was published soon after its appearance, apologizing for the silence of Dr. Kennicott, and alledging that he had no time to answer it.

While I was at Paris, I inquired of Mr. Asseline, the Hebrew professor at the Sorbonne, whether he had ever seen such a person as I described Dumay to be? He answered, that he had seen him, but that he was gone off from Paris, and he supposed nobody knew what was become of him. When I inquired farther, who had been his friends, he confessed that the Capuchins of St. Honoré were suspected to have been the compilers and editors of his book. Now the reader has heard my story, let him consider, whether he can recollect a more extraordinary character, than that of this Jew, Christian, Papist, Protestant, Soldier, Scrivener, French, Englishman! If it so happened that he survived his fourberies, he may have proved to be a serviceable hand, and have acted some useful part upon the stage of the French Revolution*.

• This man is frequently spoken of in Dr. Horne's Letters; from one of which, of March, 1770, I take what follows: "The Sieur Dumay is a curious rogue indeed! The subject is so pregnant, that I could with pleasure put out my candles, to pass the evening in meditation upon him and his proceedings, since we had first the honour of knowing him, when he talked so much of Titus and the copper fly. If the best men are most imposed upon (as some say they are) we may, I think, without vanity, esteem ourselves to be a tolerably good sort of people." N. B. The Jews have a foolish legend, that when Titus had destroyed Jerusalem, God Almighty to be revenged on the enemy of his people, sent a copper fly for his punishment, which crept up his nose, and fed upon his brain, till it had killed him.

Neither Mr. Horne nor his friends could ever be persuaded, that, under the present state of the printed Hebrew Text, the labours of an Hebrew collator were at this time wanted by the Christian world; or that the experiment, from the face with which it made its appearance, would not be attended with some danger: and it might be owing (as I have said) to their pressing remonstrances, that the plan of a new Text, and a new English Translation, was laid aside. How far they were right in apprehending evil from it to the Christian cause, doth not appear from any consequences which have yet followed, and we hope it never will. The edition makes a very fine book, which will do honour to the memory of the editor, and, with its various readings, may be a very innocent one, if used with discretion. My learned and worthy friend the late Rev. Mr. Parkhurst (the last edition of whose Hebrew Lexicon was patronized by Dr. Horne after he was made a bishop) speaks of it with due respect his words are these-" The principal various readings in Dr. Kennicott's Hebrew Bible have been carefully noted, and are submitted to the reader's consideration and judgment. And it is hoped that the use which is here made of that elaborate work cannot fail of being acceptable to every serious and intelligent inquirer into the sense of the Hebrew Scriptures." See the advertisement to the third edition.

Of the friendly way in which Dr. Kennicott and Dr. Horne lived together, forgetting all their former disputes, yet without changing their opinions on either side, so far as I have been able to discover, I have already spoken: but the cause of learning and religion is still, and ever will be, so deeply concerned in the argument between them, that it well deserves to be

remembered and understood; and for this reason only I have spent so many words upon it. I may therefore hope to be pardoned, if I still go on to do as much justice as I can to Dr. Horne's side of the question, by adding one weighty reason, which he had (though he did not say much about it) for his suspicions in regard to the good effect of the collating system *. He thought it would be of disservice to turn the minds of the learned more toward the letter of the Bible, when they were already too much turned away from the spirit of it. The best fruits of divine wisdom may be gathered from the word of God, in any language, and in any edition. To what the Scripture itself calls the spirit of the Scripture, the learned of late days were become much more inattentive than in past ages. The Puritans of the last century set a proper value upon it, and some of them did well in displaying it: but when their formal manners, with their long prayers, and their long graces, were rejected, their interpretations of the Scripture, and with them all sounder interpretations of the kind, fell into disrepute; for men are such hasty reformers, that if they cast out evil, they cast out some good along with it. When tares are plucked up, the wheat is always in danger.

To this cause another may be added. The persons, who since that time have risen into chief repute for parts and learning, had nothing of this in their compositions; such as Clarke, Hoadley, Hare, Middleton, Warburton, Sherlock, South, William Law, Edmund Law, and many others, who have flourished

* In Bishop Hurd's late Life of Dr. Warburton, Dr. Lowth is reflected upon for his expectations from the labours of Dr. Kennicott.