JOSIAH TUCKER, D.D.

HAD

DEAN OF GLOUCESTER.

AD this acute politician and excellent citizen lived in Greece or in Rome, he would have had statues and altars raised to him. From his earliest youth he appears to have been a friend to his country and the uni

verse:

Non sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo.

Whether he writes against the barbarous custom of throwing at cocks, or whether against a war that cost this country forty thousand men, the Americans eighty thousand, and incurred an additional debt to England of eighty millions, benignity, good sense, and good intention, ever guide his pen. Whether he reprobates some errors that may have crept into our excellent religious establishment, or any absurd and monopolizing practices that may have infested our commerce, the same acuteness, the same philanthropy pervade all. However a friend he may have been in his writings to an establishment in religious opinions, he has been an equal friend to universal toleration. His fate, indeed, has been that of the Trojan Prophetess

fatis aperit Cassandra futuris

Ora, Dei jussu non unquam credita Teucris.

It seems as if in a mind of energy the train of thinking was laid, and that there wanted only a spark to set it on fire. The dean was led to commercial speculations perhaps by a circumstance which took place in the little sea-port town of Aberystwith, where he lived in early life. The town was divided into partizans of the House of Hanover and the House of Stuart. The latter, to gain over the inhabitants to their cause, used to tell them, that if their prince (as the Pretender was then called) came in,

they should be all smugglers. This assertion staggered a little our young politician, who, on turning it in his mind saw plainly, that if they were all smugglers, it could not be worth any one's while to smuggle, as they would be all upon the same footing.-Divinity has no less than politics occupied the great mind of this excellent man, in spite of the well known sarcasm of his sarcastic bishop, who knowing the manliness of mind and strength of understanding of Dr. Tucker, was very anxious that he should not become his dean. How compleatly religion and trade can go together, and how subservient they may be made to each other's advantage; the dean has made very clear, when he says in one of his sermons, that trade employs the mind, and keeps it out of idleness; and that religion purifies the heart, and gives a sanction to morality.

In these times of discontent and wildness of political theories, it would seem well worth while to reprint some of the dean's treatises on government, which are now become scarce. The dean has had the honour of beholding himself burnt in effigy in his native town of Bristol, for endeavouring to promote the interests of its trade and manufactures; he had, too, in the same city, the honour soon afterwards of entering it in his carriage drawn by the inhabitants. As he was not depressed by the one, he was as little elated by the other.-Conscious of his own integrity and purity of intention, he might have exclaimed with Horace,

"Virtus repulsæ nescia sordidæ,
"Intaminatis fulget honoribus:

"Nec sumit, aut ponit secures
"Arbitrio popularis auræ."

The dean's principal theological works are, a volume of excellent Sermons, 8vo.

An Apology for the Church of England.

Two Letters to the Rev. Dr. Kippis.

Religious Intolerance no Part either of the Mosaic or Christian Dispensation.

A Brief and Dispassionate View of the Difficulties respectively attending the Trinitarian, Arian, and Socinian Systems.

Essay on the Trade of Great Britain and France,

An Appeal to the Landed Interest on a Separation from America, 1776

Cui Bono, or Enquiry into the Benefits of the War,

On the Commercial Union between Great Britain and Ireland, 8vo. 1785

This excellent man is now in his eighty-first year, and having occasion in a letter to a friend of his, written not long since, to mention the present government, or rather anarchy of France, he says, "I profess myself a friend to peace in general, and I am sorry to find that the ruling powers of France have so little understood their own interest as to stir up universal war."

The dean in all his writings has been ever an enemy to war, that scourge of the human race; and in one of his letters to a friend, written a few years since, he says, “I am a well wisher to all mankind, and am sorry to find that the Spaniards and the English are so blind to their own interests, as not to perceive that the cultivation of their own countries in Europe is of much more consequence to each of them, than the most splendid victories, in order to obtain waste lands in foreign regions."

* Written in the autumn of 1799, when there was some danger of a war between Spain and England.