[Reagrding] Mr.Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding,...[an introduction says] it is here contemplated as a philosophical account of the first sort of abbreviations in language. Had this great man been sooner aware of the inseparable connexion between words and knowledge, he would not have talked of the composition of ideas, but would have seen that it was merely a contrivance of language; for the only composition being in the terms, it is as improper to speak of a complex idea, as it would be to call a constellation a complex star; they are not ideas, but merely terms, which are general and abstract...
[About] the parts of speech ...the distribution for the two great purposes of speech, is here resolved into:
1. Words necessary for the communication of our thoughts; and,
2. Abbreviations, employed for the sake of dispatch.
In respect to the former of these, we are told,....in all languages, there are only two sorts ... which are necessary for the communication of our thoughts, and these are nouns and verbs; by means of which alone, any thing can be related or communicated ...
We are briefly informed.... that the noun is the simple or complex, the particular or general sign, or name of one or more ideas; and,... that the fate of that very necessary word the article, has been most singularly hard and unfortunate: "for though without it, or some equivalent invention, men would not communicate their thoughts at all; yet, (like many of the most useful things in the world,) from its unaffected simplicity and want of brilliancy, it has been ungratefully neglected and degraded. ....[T]he brutish inarticulate interjection, which has nothing to do with speech, and is only the miserable refuge of the speechless, has been permitted, because beautiful and gaudy, to usurp a place amongst words, and to exclude the article from its well earned dignity." It is observed soon after, "that the dominion of speech is erected upon the downfal of interjections;" and that, "the neighing of a horse, the lowing of a cow, the barking of a dog, the purring of a cat, sneezing, coughing, groaning, shrieking, and every other involuntary convulsion with oral sound, has almost as good a title to be called parts of speech as interjections have."
John Horne Took
...was born into a respectable middle-class family. His mother was a benevolent figure, persuading her husband to donate money to the Middlesex Hospital, of which he later became one of the first treasurers. Horne's father was a man of singularly independent character, exemplified by a lawsuit with Frederick, prince of Wales, who lived next door to the Horne family in Leicester House. When some of the prince's officials sought a passage to Newport market by making an opening through a wall belonging to the Horne property without seeking permission, Horne's father brought the case to court and won. Having achieved his purpose, John Horne senior allowed the doorway to be reopened and was accordingly appointed by the prince as the official supplier of poultry to his household. Despite the immediate honour of this appointment, the prince's sudden death in 1751 saw a debt of several thousand pounds unrecovered.
...After graduating from Cambridge [and some resistance to his father's plans]
Horne finally conceded, being ordained deacon on 23 September 1759 and becoming a curate in Kent. He was not, however, fully committed to his post and resigned within a few months following a sudden attack of ague....Pecuniary circumstances [soon] forced Horne ...[to accept another such position] and on 23 November 1760 he was ordained a priest. His father purchased him a living at New Brentford said to be worth between £200 and £300 a year.
.... With only a half-hearted interest in spiritual matters at best, he studied medicine in the hope of improving the physical well-being of his parishioners and opened a dispensary for their benefit. Despite these efforts and his sobriety at this time, some of his flock found cause to criticize him for what they saw as inappropriate enthusiasm for whatever entertainment the neighbourhood offered and, more particularly, for his fondness for playing cards [and Tooke eventually resigned.]
....Amid ...political controversies and legal entanglements, Horne remained a popular social figure. His political clique met at the house of Richard Liver, and he kept rooms in Frith Street near his friends Michael Moser, keeper of the Royal Academy, and Thomas Sheridan. Horne was also a keen backgammon and whist player, and as such became known to Domenico Angelo and his son, Henry, doyen of fencing masters, as well as the musicians Johann Christian Bach and Karl Abel. Despite his affability, Horne's personal life remained somewhat unsettled. By the early 1770s he had fathered a son, Sidney Montague, the eldest of his three children, who later [worked with] ... the East India Company. He was also the father of two daughters, Mary and Charlotte, both of whom used their mother's surname of Hart, but he never married. ....
[Tooke Horn's sympathies with the American colonists was apparent in his speech saying] when 'the people of America are enslaved [Britons] ... cannot be free'. Following a clash between the colonists and British troops at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the Constitutional Society, at Horne's suggestion, raised a subscription for the Americans concerned. Horne was to convey the money to Benjamin Franklin, and the society's resolutions were drawn up by Horne and published in the newspapers to announce that the subscription was for 'our beloved American fellow-subjects, who ... preferring death to slavery, were ... inhumanly murdered by the King's troops'...
...Horne found himself charged with libel for the advertisement he prepared, and on 4 July 1777 was tried before Lord Mansfield. He defended himself with characteristic forcefulness and audacity but was found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison, to pay a fine of £200, [and other financial impediments were added.]
[Later, when France fell into revolution, Tooke with his radical sympathies resulted in an] increasingly nervous government ...[having] spies working within ...[his] circle...[T]he suspicion of him as a subversive is reflected in the many caricatures in which he is portrayed as a revolutionary sansculotte.
.....
On 19 May 1794 Horne Tooke was sent to the Tower along with other radical suspects ...... A personal diary kept by Horne Tooke in his interleaved copy of Diversions records the daily inconveniences and hardships of a regimented prison life, his concerns for the welfare of his daughters, and the physical agony which accompanied the constant and painful treatment of testicular and intestinal problems. Despite the adversities, the veteran reformer was both defiant and heroic. ...
. ..[When on] 22 November the jury retired for just two minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty. Horne Tooke's acquittal was the cause of celebration, with newspapers printing trial accounts and his portrait for free. The London Corresponding Society issued commemorative medals, and anniversary dinners became a regular event among reformers, ensuring that the treason trials of 1794 and the hardships endured by the accused remained etched in radical memory.....
Despite the freedom afforded by Horne Tooke's financial security and semi-retirement from public life, he still laboured under the effects of gout. Indeed the desperate search for a cure perhaps accounts for his eccentric belief that jolting removed impurities from the human body. Thus he was in the habit of hiring a carriage and riding the roughest roads for several hours when he felt it necessary for his health. His infirmities, however, proved so debilitating that at the Westminster election of 1806 he was unable to campaign for ...[his friends].
[Toward the end and despite] his will to live, Horne Tooke knew his time was quickly passing. He prepared a tomb in his garden and had a tombstone inscribed. In his last eighteen months he treated himself to a refurnished parlour and refurbished parts of his house, but was characteristically benevolent in discharging the taxes of struggling cottagers behind his property. Horne Tooke's last days were spent in suffering, as he endured kidney stones and gangrene in the legs. Under the constant care of his daughters..., Horne Tooke refused any visit by the clergy and passed his last days correcting a copy of Shakespeare. He died on 18 March 1812 in Wimbledon and, despite his wish to be buried in his garden, his daughters and sister insisted on a traditional Christian funeral... His will bequeathed his estate and possessions to his eldest daughter, Mary Hart.....
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