[434] Sydney Owenson (c. 1783-1859) married Sir Thomas Morgan, a well-known surgeon, in 1812. Her Irish stories were very popular with the patriots but were attacked by the Quarterly Review. The Wild Irish Girl (1806) went through seven editions in two years.
[435] 1775-1817.
[436] 1771-1832.
[437] The famous preacher (1732-1808). He was the first chairman of the Religious Tract Society. He is also known as one of the earliest advocates of vaccination, in his Cow-pock Inoculation vindicated and recommended from matters of fact, 1806.
[438] Sir Rowland Hill (1795-1879), the father of penny postage.
[439] Beilby Porteus (1731-1808), Bishop of Chester (1776) and Bishop of London (1787). He encouraged the Sunday-school movement and the dissemination of Hannah More's tracts. He was an active opponent of slavery, but also of Catholic emancipation.
[440] Henrietta Maria Bowdler (1754-1830), generally known as Mrs. Harriet Bowdler. She was the author of many religious tracts and poems. Her Poems and Essays (1786) were often reprinted. The story goes that on the appearance of her Sermons on the Doctrines and duties of Christianity (published anonymously), Bishop Porteus offered the author a living under the impression that it was written by a man.
[441] William Frend (1757-1841), whose daughter Sophia Elizabeth became De Morgan's wife (1837), was at one time a clergyman of the Established Church, but was converted to Unitarianism (1787). He came under De Morgan's definition of a true paradoxer, carrying on a zealous warfare for what he thought right. As a result of his Address to the Inhabitants of Cambridge (1787), and his efforts to have abrogated the requirement that candidates for the M.A. must subscribe to the thirty-nine articles, he was deprived of his tutorship in 1788. A little later he was banished (see De Morgan's statement in the text) from Cambridge because of his denunciation of the abuses of the Church and his condemnation of the liturgy. His eccentricity is seen in his declining to use negative quantities in the operations of algebra. He finally became an actuary at London and was prominent in radical associations. He was a mathematician of ability, having been second wrangler and having nearly attained the first place, and he was also an excellent scholar in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
[442] George Peacock (1791-1858), Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Lowndean professor of astronomy, and Dean of Ely Cathedral (1839). His tomb may be seen at Ely where he spent the latter part of his life. He was one of the group that introduced the modern continental notation of the calculus into England, replacing the cumbersome notation of Newton, passing from "the dotage of fluxions to the deism of the calculus."
[443] Robert Simson (1687-1768); professor of mathematics at Glasgow. His restoration of Apollonius (1749) and his translation and restoration of Euclid (1756, and 1776—posthumous) are well known.