William Tooke

“ Tooke in the heat and pride of controversy. A person who knew him well, and greatly admired his talents, said of him that he never (to his recollection) heard him defend an opinion which he thought right, or in which he believed him to be himself sincere. He indeed provoked his antagonists into the toils by the very extravagance of his assertions, and the teasing sophistry by which he rendered them plausible. His temper was prompter to his skill. He had the manners of a man of the world, with great scholastic resources. He flung everyone else off his guard, and was himself immovable. ”

“ He knew all the cabals and jealousies and heart-burnings in the beginning of the late reign, the changes of administration and the springs of secret influence, the characters of the leading men, Wilkes, Barrè, Dunning, Chatham, Burke, the Marquis of Rockingham, North, Shelburne, Fox, Pitt, and all the vacillating events of the American war:—these formed a curious back-ground to the more prominent figures that occupied the present time, and Mr. Tooke worked out the minute details and touched in the evanescent traits with the pencil of a master. ”

“ Tooke has on all possible occasions sacrificed common sense to a false philosophy and epigrammatic logic. In opposition to this author’s assertion, that we have neither complex nor abstract ideas, I think it may be proved to a demonstration that we have no others. If our ideas were absolutely simple and individual, we could have no idea of any of those objects which in this erring, half-thinking philosophy are called individual, as a table or a chair, a blade of grass, or a grain of sand. For every one of these includes a certain configuration, hardness, colour, &c. ”

“ Tooke, who admits of fewer sorts of words, argues that there can be only as many different ideas or things, as are expressed by the different parts of speech. Thus, if substantives and adjectives do not represent substance and quality, there can be no such difference in nature, or in the human understanding. This we conceive to be a piece of as false philosophy, as if we were to affirm that there can be no difference between blue or yellow, because they are both adjectives, or between light and sound, because they are both substantives. ”

“ Tooke himself says that all metaphysical reasoning is nonsense, it is scarcely rude to say that his metaphysical reasoning is so. It appears to me to be ‘mere midsummer madness.’ He ought not indeed to have meddled with logic or metaphysics after such a declaration; he ought to have supposed that he laboured under some natural defect in this respect, as a man who finds no harmony in any tune that is played to him, may without much modesty conclude that he has no ear for music. ”

“ This is ticklish ground to tread upon. At this rate, and if the proportion holds, each man will hardly have a single particle of understanding left to his share; and in two large quarto volumes, there may not perhaps be three grains of solid sense. Mr. Tooke, as a man of wit, may naturally wish to turn every thing to point. But this method will not hold in metaphysics: it is necessary to spin the thread of our ideas a little finer, and to take up with the flimsy texture of mental appearances. ”

“ Tooke did not answer the expectations that had been conceived of him, or probably that he had conceived of himself. It is natural for men who have felt a superiority over all those whom they happen to have encountered, to fancy that this superiority will continue, and that it will extend from individuals to public bodies. ”

“ He has neither acuteness of remark, nor a flow of language, both which might be expected from his writings, as these are no less distinguished by a sustained and impassioned tone of declamation than by novelty of opinion or brilliant tracks of invention. In company, Horne Tooke used to make a mere child of him—or of any man! ”

“ Tooke says, the complexity is in the term. I should say, the individuality is in the term, that is, in the application of one name to a collective idea, which superficial reasoners, at once the slaves of idle paradox and vulgar prejudice, have therefore imagined to be one thing. The whole error of this system has, indeed, arisen from considering ideas themselves, or those particular objects, which are marked by a single name, or strike at once, and in a mass, upon the senses, as simple things. ”

“ Home thereupon, by a bold libel on the Speaker, drew public attention to the case, and, although he himself was placed for a time in the custody of the sergeant-at-arms, the clauses which were injurious to the interests of Mr Tooke were eliminated from the bill through the publicity which his conduct had given to the matter. Mr Tooke's gratitude knew no bounds; he declared his intention of making his friend the heir to his fortune, and, if the design was never carried into effect, Home derived from the generous old man during his life time large gifts of money. ”

“ Horne Tooke, who after enumerating seventeen different definitions of the verb, and laughing at them all as deficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumes does not tell us what the verb really is, and has left posterity to pluck out ‘the heart of his mystery.’ I will say at once what it is that distinguishes this interest from others, and that is its abstractedness. The interest we feel in human nature is exclusive, and confined to the individual; the interest we feel in external nature is common, and transferable from one object to all others of the same class. ”

“ But a man may sneer and cavil and puzzle and fly-blow every question that comes before him—be despised and feared by others, and admired by no one but himself. He who thinks first of himself, either in the world or in a popular assembly, will be sure to turn attention away from his claims, instead of fixing it there. He must make common cause with his hearers. To lead, he must follow the general bias. Mr. Tooke did not therefore succeed as a speaker in parliament. ”

“ Tooke's mind; and with these he baffled the Judge, dumb-founded the Counsel, and outwitted the Jury. The report of his trial before Lord Kenyon is a master-piece of acuteness, dexterity, modest assurance, and legal effect. It is much like his examination before the Commissioners of the Income-Tax—nothing could be got out of him in either case!
Mr. Tooke, as a political leader, belonged to the class of trimmers; or at most, it was his delight to make mischief and spoil sport. He would rather be against himself than for any body else. He was neither a bold nor a safe leader. ”

“ Lord Temple endeavoured to secure his exclusion on the ground that he had taken orders in the Church, and one of Gilray’s caricatures delineates the two politicians, Temple and Camelford, playing at battledore and shuttlecock, with Horne Tooke as the shuttlecock. The ministry of Addington would not support this suggestion, but a bill was at once introduced by them and carried into law, which rendered all persons in holy orders ineligible to sit in the House of Commons, and Horne Tooke sat for that parliament only. ”

“ Between 1782 and 1790 Tooke gave his support to Pitt, and in the election for Westminster, a constituency in which Fox was vitally interested, he threw all his energies into the ministerial cause. With Fox he was never on terms of friendship, and Samuel Rogers, in his Table Talk, asserts that their antipathy was so pronounced that at a dinner party given by a prominent Whig not the slightest notice was taken by Fox of the presence of Home Tooke. It was after the election of Westminster in 1788 that Tooke depicted the two rival statesmen in his celebrated pamphlet of Two Pair of Portraits. ”

“ Warner and his colleagues in the movement hoped to make the fund worth Home Tooke's acceptance. The subscriptions ranged from £50 to £300. Cumberland duly responded to the invitation and received from Warner, who was then staying at Wimbledon with Home Tooke, warm thanks for his letters " and for their very agreeable accompaniments." His attention was also drawn to Tooke's "tight little correspondence" with the clerk to the income tax commissioners. ”

“ Mourning rings were left to many illustrious persons. The list included, besides Tooke and Cartwright, the names of sir Richard Colt Hoare, Robert Fergusson, William Hayley, William Bosville, William Frend, Thomas Wakefield and his brother, Gilbert Wakefield and bore striking witness to his friendship with those prominent in the cause of reform. His sisters Frances Mary S l John, Louisa Henrietta Warner and a third woman, Susanna Lambert, received £100 a year for life " not to be under the control of present or future husbands." ”

“ The piece was hideous, and Elizabeth Fry’s playing was a degree worse than the piece. Bella’s head ached woefully by the time her pupil had pounded through the brilliant finale, but she bore up heroically, and heard Horne Tooke read about William the Conqueror [146] in a drawling voice—with a nasal ad libitum accompaniment. These children never seemed to get beyond William the Conqueror and his immediate posterity. ”

“ Tooke’s etymological system as an actual history of language, but to that superficial gloss of philosophy which is spread over it, and to the whole of his logic: I might instance in the axiom, on which the whole turns, that ‘it is as absurd to talk of a complex idea as of a complex star.’ Now this and such like phrases had better have been left out: it is a good antithesis, but it is nothing more. Or if it had been put into the mouth of Sir Francis, who is a young man of lively parts, and then gravely answered by Mr. ”

“ TOOKE, John Horne (1736-1812) , an ardent politician and an erudite philologer, was the third son of John Home, a poulterer in Newport Market, whose business the son, when a pupil at Eton with other boys of a more aristocratic position, in early life happily veiled under the title of a " Turkey merchant." He was born in Newport Street, Long Acre, Westminster, on 25th June 1736. ”

“ Horne Tooke,’ alleging that Paull had thrust himself upon him; but the accusation was rashly made, and easily dispelled in ‘A Refutation of the Calumnies of John Horne Tooke, by James Paull,’ 1807. In 1808 there came out ‘A Letter from Mr. Paull to Samuel Whitbread,’ in which he attributed the loss of his election for Westminster to the influence of that politician. His letter to Lord Folkestone on the impeachment of the Marquis of Wellesley is in Cobbett's ‘Political Register,’ on 25 Oct. 1806 (pp. 648–56) . ”

“ Meanwhile, men of the stamp of Horne Tooke, William Cobbett, Hone, ‘Orator’ Hunt, and Major Cartwright—brother of Lord John Russell’s tutor at Woburn, and the originator of the popular cry, ‘One man, one vote’—were in various ways keeping the question steadily before the minds of the people. ”

“ Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house Affaires would draw her hence:
Which euer as she could with haste dispatch,
She'l'd come againe, and with a greedie eare
Deuoure vp my discourse. Which I obseruing,
Tooke once a pliant houre, and found good meanes
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart,
That I would all my Pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not instinctiuely: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her teares,
When I did speake of some distressefull stroke
That my youth suffer'd: My Storie being done,
She gaue me for my paines a world of kisses: ”

“ TOOKER, or TUCKER, WILLIAM (1558?–1621) , divine, born at Exeter in 1557 or 1558, was the third son of William Tooker of that town by his wife Honora, daughter of James Erisey of Erisey in Cornwall (Westcote, Devonshire, 1845, p. 526) . He was admitted to Winchester College in 1572, and became a scholar at New College, Oxford, in 1575, graduating B.A. on 16 Oct. ”

“ Tooke was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 12 March 1818. He was present at the first annual meeting of the Law Institution on 5 June 1827, and was mainly instrumental in obtaining a royal charter of incorporation for that society in January 1832. For some years he was the usual chairman of the meetings and dinners, and when Lord Brougham was meditating a measure for the establishment of local courts, he addressed to him a letter in defence of the profession of an attorney (ib. 1831, i. 74) . From an earlier period he was a leading member of the Society of Arts ”

“ By G. T. Esq.,' London, 1652, 4to. The work, which is in prose and verse, is dedicated to 'his much honoured cousin Mr John Greaves' [q. v.] Another edition was published in 1654 with a print by Wenceslaus Hollar [q. v.] ; and a third in 1659. After the return of the expedition to Plymouth a severe mortality broke out on board the ships, and Tooke's health was so much impaired that he was eventually compelled to retire from military service. ”

“ No one has done more to overthrow his baseless fabric than the late Mr. Garnett, [199] in an article on English Lexicography, who has shown in particular that the details of his much-vaunted analysis of the particles may be contested more often than admitted, and indeed that his theory contains very little that can be safely relied upon. Tooke seems to have been led to his system by the conjecture that “if” is equivalent to “gif,” an imperative of the verb “to give;” ”