Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 18.djvu/101

 on the ground that there being no express statute of the university forbidding usury or the lending money to minors, the vice-chancellor's court had no jurisdiction in the case. Lord Mansfield, however, censured Ewin's conduct in the strongest terms, stigmatised him as ‘a corrupter of youth and an usurer,’ and suggested that a statute to meet such cases in future should be passed, and that the great seal should be petitioned that he might be struck out of the commission of the peace (, Annals of Cambridge, iv. 388–9, 392). On 20 Oct. 1779 he was restored to his degree of LL.D., but was put out of the county commission in 1781. Eventually he fixed himself at Brentford, Middlesex, where ‘his strict attention to the administration of parochial concerns, quick to discern and severe to condemn every species of idleness and imposition, created him many enemies, particularly among the lower orders of people’ (Gent. Mag. vol. lxxiv. pt. ii. p. 1174). He died at Brentford Butts on 29 Dec. 1804, aged 73, and was buried in the chapel of New Brentford, where a monument by Flaxman records his many virtues (, Environs, Supplement, p. 103). He was supposed to have left property amounting to over 100,000l.

No portrait of Ewin is known to be extant, but there is a print dated 1773 representing Mr. Stanley, grandson of the then Earl of Derby, spitting in his face, for which affront the doctor prosecuted him (Addit. MS. 5844, f. 80). He was the subject of many effusions of undergraduate hate in both Latin and English, some of which were printed and hawked by ballad-mongers about the town. Two are given by Cole (ib. 5804, ff. 68 b, 69 b, 5808, f. 218 b–219).

[Nichols's Lit. Anecd. vols. i. viii.; Addit. MSS. 5804, ff. 68 b, 69 b, 70 b, 5808, ff. 7 b–14, 218 b, 219, 219 b, 5844, f. 80, 5855, ff. 294, 295.] 

EWING, GREVILLE (1767–1841), congregational minister, the son of Alexander Ewing, a teacher of mathematics, was born in 1767 at Edinburgh, and studied with considerable distinction at the high school and university there. Of a deeply religious temperament, he decided to prepare for the ministry, much against his father's wishes. On being licensed as a probationer he was chosen, first as assistant and afterwards as colleague to the Rev. Dr. Jones, minister of Lady Glenorchy's Chapel, Edinburgh (17 Oct. 1793). Here he soon acquired wide popularity as a preacher, and exercised his ministry with great success. Missions attracted much of his attention, and in 1796 he took an active part in the formation of the Edinburgh Missionary Society, becoming its first secretary. He was also editor of the ‘Missionary Magazine’ from 1796 to 1799. When Robert Haldane of Airthrey [q. v.] projected a mission to India, Ewing was appointed to go out, but the directors of the East India Company refused to sanction the undertaking, and it was abandoned. He then joined with the brothers Haldane in an important missionary movement at home. Among its supporters were many who had not received presbyterian ordination. It was condemned in a pastoral admonition from the general assembly of the established church. Ewing, who regarded the congregational system as more scriptural and more elastic than the presbyterian, had in 1798 resigned his charge as minister of Lady Glenorchy's Chapel, as well as his connection with the church of Scotland. In 1799 he became minister of a congregational church in Glasgow, and retained the charge till 1836. As a result of his labours with the Haldanes and afterwards with Dr. Ralph Wardlaw, congregationalism was introduced into Scotland. He was tutor of the Glasgow Theological Academy—a congregationalist foundation—from its foundation in 1809 till 1836, and did much to promote the study of the Bible in the original languages. In 1812 he helped to form the Congregational Union of Scotland.

Ewing was thrice married: in 1794 to Anne Innes, who died in 1795; in 1799 to Janet Jamieson, who died in 1801; and in 1802, to Barbara, daughter of Sir James Maxwell, bart., of Pollok, and stepdaughter of Sir John Shaw Stewart, bart., of Ardgowan. Ewing's third wife died 14 Sept. 1828, in consequence of an accident at the Falls of Clyde, and her husband published a memoir, of which a second edition appeared in 1829. By his second wife he had one daughter, who married James Matheson, a congregational minister.

During the last few years of his life Ewing was in broken health, and had to discontinue his regular work. He died suddenly on 2 Aug. 1841.

In 1801 he published a Greek grammar and lexicon for students of the New Testament (2nd ed. 1812, 3rd ed. 1827). He also published several pamphlets and sermons, and two larger works—‘Essays to the Jews, on the Law and the Prophets,’ 2 vols. (1809–1810), and an ‘Essay on Baptism’ (1823). He edited the ‘Missionary Magazine’ (Edinburgh, vols. i–iii. 1796–8).

[A Memoir of Greville Ewing, by his daughter, J. J. Matheson (1843); Memoir of Barbara Ewing, by her husband; A. Haldane's Lives of Robert and James Haldane; Hew Scott's Fasti, i. 80; Kay's Edinburgh Portraits.] 