obtained the respectable place of third senior optime: but he gained the first of the medals annually given by the Chancellor of the University to the two commencing bachelors of arts, under certain restrictions, who pass the best examination in classical learning. In the following September he was elected Fellow of Trinity College. He proceeded to the degree of M.A. in 1785; but being unwilling, from conscientious motives, to subscribe to the articles of the Established Church, he could not take orders, and, according to the rules of the College, vacated his Fellowship in 1791. He was thus for the second time dependant upon the liberality of his friends. Nor did they neglect him a subscription was entered into by Mr. Cracherode and some others, from the proceeds of which a life annuity of 100l. was purchased for him.

In 1792 he was elected Regius Professor of Greek: but, as the salary of this office is only 407. per annum, he was still a poor man; and not being able to procure a suitable lecture room, he was prevented from making the usual addition to his income, by delivering lectures on the Greek authors. In 1795 he married Mrs. Lunan, the sister of Mr. Perry, the well-known Editor of the Morning Chronicle. From this union, short as it proved, Porson derived important benefits. He laid aside, while it lasted, most of the unseemly and intemperate habits which he had contracted at College: but unfortunately his wife died of consumption in 1797, and he subsequently relapsed into his former course of life, and, as is too notorious, sacrificed friends, health and fortune, to his passion for drinking. After her death the kindness of his brother-in-law provided him with a home, gave him an opportunity of mixing in good society, and preserved him from many inconveniences, to which a man of Porson's careless habits is always exposed. About the time of his wife's death, in 1797, Porson published an edition of the Hecuba of Euripides; which he intended to form the first portion of a complete edition of that poet, and which, with very modest pretensions, was at once acknowledged to be a piece of firstrate criticism by the scholars not only of England but of all Europe. However, in 1800, Gottfried Hermann of Leipzig, who has since become very eminent as a verbal critic, published an edition of the same play, as a professed attack on Porson's; and there was something in the tone, as well as in the matter of his strictures, which more than counterbalanced the compliment at the commencement of the preface. When, therefore, Porson republished the 'Hecuba,' in 1802, he added to the preface a long Supplement, in which Hermann was treated rather superciliously; indeed it appears from a letter which Porson wrote to Professor Dalzel, of Edinburgh, on the third of September, 1803, that he entertained a most sincere contempt for his German

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