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241 was put under the charge of a good tutor; yet by the fondness of his indulgent mother, then a widow, he became idle, a great jockey, married, evidently at an early age, and ran out of a good part of the estate descended to him. Wood adds that "Being a man of good parts he afterwards took up [which is Anthony Wooden for braced up], lived for some years a retired life, and improved much his nature and the gay geny that he had to dramatic poetry."

George Horne, Commentator on the Psalms, won the Maidstone Scholarship at University College in 1745; and he was graduated in 1749, to take a Fellowship at Magdalen, where the greater part of the rest of his life was spent.

The extraordinary capacity and precocious genius of William Jones, the Orientalist, which were so marked at Harrow, bore rich fruits at Oxford. He became a Commoner at University College in the spring of 1764, a Scholar in the autumn of the same year, and a Fellow two years later. While there he maintained himself as private tutor in a distinguished family, which gave him happy opportunities to be taken abroad in the Long Vacations, where he was enabled to improve his knowledge of foreign languages. Besides being fluent in German, in Spanish, and in Portuguese, he mastered Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew; and at