AMMONIO, ANDREA (1477-1517), Latin secretary to Henry VIII, was born at Lucca in Italy, and lived during his early years in Rome, where he acquired a great reputation as a classical student. He was sent to England as apostolic notary and collector for the pope, and became the friend of the eminent English scholars, John Colet and William Grocyn, and of Erasmus, then residing in this country. For some time he lodged with the celebrated Sir Thomas More, and suffered great misery, as he says in one of his letters to Erasmus (ERASM. Epist. 125), where he expresses his regret at having left Rome. In 1512 the king gave him a canonry and a prebendal stall in the cathedral of Westminster, and the following year he was appointed Latin secretary to Henry VIII, and was made prebendary of Compton-Dundon and Writhlington in Somersetshire, as well as prebendary of Fordington in the diocese of Salisbury. The same year he accompanied the king during his campaign in France, and is said to have celebrated the Battle of the Spurs, the taking of Tournay and Terouenne, as well as the victory obtained in Scotland over James IV, in a Latin poem called Panegyricus, which seems never to have been printed, but was highly extolled by Erasmus. În 1514 he became naturalised by letters patent, and it is said that shortly afterwards Leo X appointed him his nuncio at the English court. But, according to the 'Calendar of State Papers' (ii. par. 774), Ammonio was still secretary to the king in 1516, whilst the pope's nuncio was Cardinal Chieregato. Sir Thomas More in a letter to Erasmus, dated 19 Aug. 1517, bewails the loss of Andrea Ammonio, who died, probably the day before, of the sweating sickness, when he had not yet reached his fortieth year. This sickness seems to have attacked him suddenly, for on 14 July he wrote to the Marquis of Mantua, professing his devotion (Calendar of Venetian State Papers, ii. par. 906). Eleven of his letters are found among those of Erasmus, and three holograph letters are in the manuscript department of the British Museum. In one of these three he raises Wolsey's suspicion against the Bishop of Worcester; in the second he exposes to the cardinal the dangers threatening Italy from the Turks and the Swiss, and in the third he expresses his apprehension that the pope will join France unless Henry VIII can bring the Swiss to

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assist him. In the Scriptorum illustrium Majoris Brytanniæ Catalogus,' Bâle, 1559 (cent. xiii. num. 45), it is mentioned that Ammonio wrote several eclogues, bucolic and other poems and epigrams, a history of the war in Scotland, and a 'De Rebus Nihili,' all in Latin. These seem to have been lost, or perhaps were never published. A clever Latin eclogue, however, between Ammon and Lycas, was printed in the 'Bucolicorum Auctores,' Bâle, 1546, and a poem entitled Lucensis, carmen Asclepiadeum et alia carmina,' attributed to Ammonio, is said to have been, in 1784, in the Royal Library of Paris.

[Giammaria Mazzuchelli's Gli Scrittori d'Italia, vol. i. part 2; Desiderius Erasmus, Epistolæ; John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Majoris Brytanniæ, &c.; Adelung's continuation of Jöcher's Allgemeines Gelehrten Lexicon; Brit. Mus. Catal.]

H. v. L.

AMNER, JOHN (d. 1641), was appointed organist of Ely Cathedral and master of the choristers in 1610. He took the de

gree of Mus. Bac. at Oxford in 1613, and seems to have been in holy orders. He composed several services and anthems, the authedral library at Ely, and other manuscript tographs of which are preserved in the cacompositions by him are in the British Museum, and the collections at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Christ Church, Oxford. 1615 he published a collection of Sacred Hymns for Voices and Viols.' He died at Ely in 1641.

In

AMNER, RALPH (d. 1664), a relation of John Amner, was admitted a lay clerk of Ely Cathedral in 1604, and retained the post until 1609, when he was succeeded by Michael Este. He seems to have been in holy orders, for he was soon after this appointed to a minor canonry at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. On the death of John Amery in 1623 Amner was sworn in as gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he sang bass. On this his canonry at Windsor was declared vacant; but on the mediation of Charles I (then Prince of Wales) he was allowed by the dean and chapter to retain it. He was present at the coronation of Charles II, and died at Windsor 3 March 1663-4. In Hilton's 'Catch that Catch Can' (1667) there is a'catch instead of an epitaph upon Mr. Ralph Amner of Windsor (commonly called the Bull-Speaker),' the music of which is by Dr. Child.

[Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal (Camden Soc. 1872), pp. 10, 11, 13, 57, 58, 94, 128, 207; Dickson's Catalogue of Ancient Music in Ely Cathedral (1861); Sloane MS. 4847, ff. 39, 45.]

W. B. S.

AMNER, RICHARD (1736-1803), a presbyterian (otherwise unitarian) divine, and born in 1736, was one of several children of Richard and Anne Amner, of Hinckley, Leicestershire, his baptism, in the register of the presbyterian (otherwise unitarian) meeting-house there, being set down for 26 April 1737. He entered the Daventry Academy, to prepare for a dissenting pulpit, in 1755; he stayed there seven years, accepting the charge of the unitarian chapel in Middlegate Street, Yarmouth, 21 July 1762 (BROWNE'S Congregationalism in Norfolk and Suffolk). Here his theology did not prove to be in harmony with the theology of his congregation; and, preaching to them for the last time on 5 March 1764, he moved to Hampstead, London, where he commenced duty the following year, 1765. He published three books whilst at Hampstead: 1. 'A Dissertation on the Weekly Festival of the Christian Church' (anonymous), 1768. 2. An Account of the Positive Institutions of Christianity,' 1774. 3. An Essay towards the Interpretation of the Prophecies of Daniel,' 1776. In 1777 he left to be pastor at Coseley, Staffordshire; he retained this charge till the end of 1794, when, retiring from the ministry to devote himself entirely to study in Hinckley, his native town, he became one of the contributors to the 'Gentleman's Magazine' (NICHOLS'S Preface to General Index to Gent. Mag. from 1787 to 1818). He published his fourth, and last, volume there, ‘Considerations on the Doctrines of a Future State,' in 1797, and died 8 June 1803, aged 67.

George Steevens lived at Hampstead during the twelve years that Amner preached there; and in 1793 (Amner having removed in 1777, sixteen years before), when Steevens brought out his renowned edition of Shakespeare, it was found that he had put Amner's name to gross notes to which he was ashamed to put his own. Allibone gives an erroneous account of this literary scandal, which procured much sympathy for Amner in its day.

[Park's Hampstead, p. 237; Wilson's MSS. in Dr. Williams's Library; Horne's Introduction to the Crit. Study of the Holy Scriptures, p. 339; Orme's Bibliotheca Biblica, p. 12; Gent. Mag. June 1803; Chalmers's Gen. Biog. Dict. art. Amner;' Nichols's Illustrations of Literature, viii. 335; Steevens's Shakespeare, xii. 503; Monthly Magazine, xv. 594; Monthly Review, 1. 159; Nichols's Leicestershire, iv. 747; Christian

Life, vol. ix. No. 350; British Critic, O.S. xiii. 294 et seq.] J. H.

AMORY, THOMAS, D.D. (1701-1774), dissenting tutor, was born at Taunton on 28 Jan. 1701. His father was a grocer and his mother a sister of the Rev. Henry Grove. He was at school under Chadwick, a local dissenting minister, and learned French at Exeter under Majendie, a refugee minister. On 25 March 1717 he entered, as a divinity student, the Taunton Academy, then the chief seat of culture for the dissenters of the west, under Stephen James of Fullwood, who taught theology, and Henry Grove, who taught philosophy. He received his testimonials for the ministry in 1722, and then went to London to study experimental physics in the academy of the Rev. John Eames, F.R.S., Moorfields. In 1725, on Stephen James's death and before his own ordination, he acted as assistant in the ministry to Robert Darch, at Hull Bishops, who died 31 Jan. 1737-8, aged 65, and in the Taunton Academy to Grove. He was ordained 3 Oct. 1730 as colleague to Edmund Batson at Paul's Meeting, Taunton. Batson was more conservative in theology than Amory, and besides was unwilling to divide the stipend; hence, in 1732, Amory's friends seceded and built him a new meeting-house in Tancred Street. On Grove's death in 1738 Amory was placed at the head of the academy. A list of his students is given in the Monthly Repository,' 1818; there were more men of mark under Grove; Amory's best pupils were Thomas and John Wright of Bristol. In 1741 he married Mary, daughter of the Rev. S. Baker of Southwark. By her he had five children, four of whom survived him. He removed to London in October 1759 to become afternoon preacher at the Old Jewry, and in 1766 succeeded Dr. S. Chandler as co-pastor of the congregation with Nathaniel White. He was elected one of Dr. Williams's trustees in 1767 (his portrait is in the Williams Library). He received the degree of D.D. Edin. in 1768, and was Tuesday lecturer at Salters' Hall from 1768, and morning preacher at Newington Green, as colleague with Dr. Richard Price, from 1770, in addition to his other duties. Though thus full of preaching engagements, he was not so popular in London as he had been in Taunton. His theology, of the Clarkean type, was not conservative enough for the bulk of the London presbyterians of that day. His style was dry and disquisitional; his manner wanting in animation. But he was a leader of the dissenting liberals, and in 1772 a strenuous supporter of the agi

memoirs to give some recollections of Swift and of Mrs. Grierson was never fulfilled.

[Life in General Biog. Dict. 1798, slightly compressed in Chalmers's Biog. Dict.; Hazlitt's Round Table, essay 18; Retrospective Review (1st series), vi. 100; Notes and Queries (1st series), xi. 58; Gent. Mag. lviii. 1062, lix. 107, 322, 372; Saturday Review, 12 May 1877.] L. S.

AMOS, ANDREW (1791-1860), lawyer and professor of law, was born in 1791 in India, where his father, James Amos, Russian merchant, of Devonshire Square, London, who had travelled there, had married Cornelia Bonté, daughter of a Swiss general officer in the Dutch service. The family was Scotch, and took its name in the time of the Covenanters. Andrew Amos was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow, after graduating as fifth wrangler in 1813. He was called to the bar by the Middle Temple and joined the Midland circuit, where he soon acquired a reputation for rare legal learning, and his personal character secured him a large arbitration practice. He married, 1 Aug. 1826, Margaret, daughter of the Rev. William Lax, Lowndean professor of astronomy at Cambridge.

Within the next eight years he became auditor of Trinity College, Cambridge; recorder of Oxford, Nottingham, and Banbury; fellow of the new London University; and criminal law commissioner.

The first criminal law commission on which Amos sat consisted of Mr. Thomas (afterwards Professor) Starkie, Mr. Henry Bellenden Ker, Mr. William (afterwards Mr. Justice) Wightman, Mr. John Austin, and himself. The commission was renewed at intervals between 1834 and 1843, Mr. Amos being always a member of it. Seven reports were issued, the seventh report, of 1843, containing a complete criminal code, systematically arranged into chapters, sections, and articles. The historical and constitutional aspects of the subject received minute attention at every point, and the perplexed topic of criminal punishments was considered in all its relations. Amos's correspondence with the chief justice of Australia in reference to the transportation system partially appears in the report, and he was consulted by the chief justice as to the extension of trial by jury under the peculiar circumstances of the settlement.

On the foundation of the University of London, afterwards called University College, Amos was first professor of English law, with Mr. Austin, professor of jurisprudence, as his colleague. Between the years 1829

and 1837 Amos's lectures attained great celebrity. It was the first time that lectures on law at convenient hours had been made accessible to both branches of the profession, and Amos's class sometimes included as many as 150 students. Amos encouraged his classes by propounding subjects for essays, by free and informal conversation, by repeated examinations, and by giving prizes for special studies, as, for instance, for the study of Coke's writings. He repeatedly received testimonials from his pupils, and his bust was presented to University College. In 1837 Amos was appointed fourth member' of the governor-general's council in India, in succession to Lord Macaulay, and for the next five years he took an active part in rendering the code sketched out by his predecessor practically workable. He also took a part as a member of the 'law commission' in drafting the report on slavery in India which resulted in the adoption of measures for its gradual extinction. commissioners were unanimous on the leading recommendation that it would be more beneficial for the slaves themselves, as well as a wiser and safer course, to direct immediate attention to the removal of the abuses of slavery than to recommend its sudden and abrupt abolition.' Amos, with two commissioners, differed from the remaining two as to the remedies to be proposed. The majority inclined to leave untouched the lawful status of slavery, and with it the lawful power of the master to punish and restrain. They thought this power necessary as a check to the propensity to idleness which the situation of the slave naturally produces.

The

At the close of Amos's term in India, he was forced into an official controversy with Lord Ellenborough, the governor-general, as to the right of the fourth member' to sit at all meetings of the council in a political as well as a legislative capacity. When Lord Ellenborough's general official conduct was brought under the notice of the House of Commons, his alleged discourtesy to Amos was used as an argument in the debate by Lord John Russell, but this controversy was closed by the production by Sir Robert Peel of a private letter given to him without authorisation in which Amos incidentally spoke of his social relations in his usual way. It was a lasting political misfortune for Amos that by this misadventure his political adversaries won the day in a debate of the first importance.

On Amos's return to England in 1843 he was nominated one of the first countycourt judges, his circuit being Marylebone, Brentford, and Brompton. In 1848 he was

elected Downing professor of laws at Cambridge, an office he held till his death in 1860. Amos was throughout life a persistent student, and published various books of importance on legal, constitutional, and literary subjects.

His first book was an examination into certain trials in the courts in Canada relative to the destruction of the Earl of Selkirk's settlement on the Red River. It had been alleged that in June 1816 the servants of the North-West Company had destroyed that settlement and murdered Governor Temple and twenty of his people. A few accused persons were brought to trial before the courts of law in Upper Canada, and they were all acquitted. Amos reproduced and criticised the proceedings at some of these trials, and denounced the state of things as one to which no British colony had hitherto afforded a parallel, private vengeance arrogating the functions of public law; murder justified in a British court of judicature, on the plea of exasperation commencing years before the sanguinary act; the spirit of monopoly raging in all the terrors of power, in all the force of organisation, in all the insolence of impunity.'

In 1825 Amos edited for the syndics of the university of Cambridge Fortescue's 'De Laudibus Legum Anglie,' appending the English translation of 1775, and original notes, or rather dissertations, by himself. These notes are full of antiquarian research into the history of English law. His name is familiar in the legal world through the treatise on the law of fixtures, which he published, in concert with Mr. Ferrard, in 1827, when the law on the subject was wholly unsettled, never having been treated systematically. He found a congenial part of his task to consist in the examination of the legal history of heirlooms, charters, crown jewels, deer, fish, and 'things' annexed to the freehold of the church, such as mourning hung in the church, tombstones, pews, organs, and bells.

He had shared with Mr. March Phillipps the task of bringing out a treatise on the law of evidence, and had taken upon himself the whole charge of the preparation of the eighth edition, published in 1838; when, in 1837, he went to India, he had not quite finished the work.

In 1846 he wrote 'The Great Oyer of Poisoning, an account of the trial of the Earl of Somerset for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, a subject important for its bearing on the constitutional aspects of state trials. In the same year he dedicated to his lifelong friend, Dr. Whewell, four 'Lectures on the

Advantages of a Classical Education as auxiliary to a Commercial Education.'

Among his purely constitutional treatises may be mentioned The Ruins of Time exemplified in Sir Matthew Hale's Pleas of the Crown' (1856). The object of this was to advocate the adoption of a code of criminal law. In 1857 followed The English Constitution in the reign of Charles II,' and in 1858 'Observations on the Statutes of the Reformation Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII,' in which he presented a different view of the subject from that of the corresponding chapters of Mr. Froude's History which had then lately appeared.

be

Among his purely literary works may mentioned Gems of Latin Poetry' (1851), a collection, with notes, of choice Latin verses of all periods, and illustrating remarkable actions and occurrences, 'biography, places, and natural phenomena, the arts, and inscriptions.' In 1858 he published Martial and the Moderns,' a translation into English prose of select epigrams of Martial arranged under heads with examples of the uses to which they had been applied.

He published various introductory lectures on diverse parts of the laws of England, and pamphlets on various subjects, such as the constitution of the new county courts, the expediency of admitting the testimony of parties to suits, and other measures of legal reform.

Amos's political and philosophical convictions were those of an advanced liberalism qualified by a profound knowledge of the constitutional development of the country and of the sole conditions under which the public improvements for which he longed and lived could alone be hopefully attempted. Though he was in constant communication with the leading reformers of his day, and was a candidate for Hull on the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832, he concerned himself little at any time with strictly party politics.

AMPHLETT, SIR RICHARD PAUL (1809-1883), judge, was the eldest son of the Rev. Richard Holmden Amphlett, lord of the manor and rector of Hadsor in Worcestershire. (The pedigree of the family from William Amphlett, lord of the manor in the time of James I, will be found in NASH'S Worcestershire, i. 481.) By birth he was a native of Shropshire. He was educated at the grammar school of Brewood in Staffordshire, on leaving which he went to Cambridge, entering St. Peter's College; and in the mathematical tripos of 1831 he was placed