PRIESTLEY. 407 



She was an amiable woman, and endowed with great 

 strength of mind, which was destined afterwards to be 

 severely tried. By her he had several children, one of 

 whom survived them both. 



He appears to have chiefly devoted himself to theo- 

 logical studies, and hence the great disproportion which 

 his Hebrew and Greek learning bears to his other ac- 

 quirements. Metaphysical speculations, next to these, 

 engaged his attention ; and the influence produced in 

 his mind, and even his conduct, by Dr. Hartley's cele- 

 brated work ('Observations on Man'), has been re- 

 corded by himself. " I hardly know," he says, 

 " whether it more enlightens the understanding or 

 improves the heart." He says he also had studied com- 

 position, and mainly by the help of writing poetry, of no 

 merit, but according to him the best means of learning 

 to write good prose. That his taste, however, was some- 

 what deficient in this respect we may fairly affirm, 

 when we find him pronouncing, many years after, a 

 decided opinion that Belsham's 'History' is written 

 in a better style than Robertson's or Hume's.* The 

 universality of his attempts may be judged from his 

 delivering at Warrington a course of lectures on ana- 

 tomy. He sought relaxation from music, and learnt 

 to play on the flute. He strongly recommends this to 

 students, especially, he says with some naivete, such 

 as have no fine ear, " for they will be the less annoyed 

 by bad music." 



As early as during his education at Daventry he 

 had written a work which, however, was not published 

 till twenty years later ; it was the ' Institutes of 



* Mem. and Cor. 1796, vol. i. part ii. p. 358. 



