Lord Byron remembered Porson at Cambridge; in the hall where he himself dined, at the Vice-Chancellor's table, and Porson at the Dean's, he always appeared sober in his demeanour, nor was he guilty, as far as his lordship knew, of any excess or outrage in public; but in an evening, with a party of undergraduates, he would, in fits of intoxication, get into violent disputes with the young men, and arrogantly revile them for not knowing what he thought they might be expected to know. He once went away in disgust, because none of them knew the name of "the Cobbler of Messina." In this condition Byron had seen him at the rooms of William Bankes, the Nubian discoverer, where he would pour forth whole pages of various languages, and distinguish himself especially by his copious floods of Greek.
Lord Byron further tells us that he had seen Sheridan "drunk, with all the world; his intoxication was that of Bacchus, but Porson's that of Silenus. Of all the disgusting brutes, sulky, abusive, and intolerable, Porson was the most bestial, so far as the few times that I saw him went, which were only at William Bankes's rooms. He was tolerated in this state among the young men for his talents, as the Turks think a madman inspired, and bear with him. He used to write, or rather vomit, pages of all languages, and could hiccup Greek like a Helot; and certainly Sparta never shocked her children with a grosser exhibition than this man's intoxication."
The library of the institution appears, however, to have derived little advantage from Porson's supervision of it, beyond the few criticisms which were found in his handwriting in some of the volumes. Owing to his very irregular habits, the great scholar proved but an inefficient librarian; he was irregular in attendance, and was frequently brought home at midnight drunk. The directors had determined to dismiss him, and said they only knew him as their librarian from seeing his name attached to receipts of salary. Indeed, he was already breaking up, and his stupendous memory had begun to fail. On the 19th of September, 1806, he left the Old Jewry to call on his brother-in-law, Perry, in the Strand, and at the corner of Northumberland Street was struck down by a fit of apoplexy. He was carried over to the St. Martin's Lane workhouse, and there slowly recovered consciousness. Mr. Savage, the under-librarian, seeing an advertisement in the British Press, describing a person picked up, having Greek memoranda in his pocket, went to the workhouse and brought Porson home in a hackney coach; he talked about the fire which the night before had destroyed Covent Garden Theatre, and as they rounded St. Paul's, remarked upon the ill treatment Wren had received. On reaching the Old Jewry, and after he had breakfasted, Dr. Adam Clarke called and had a conversation with Porson about a stone with a Greek inscription, brought from Ephesus; he also discussed a Mosaic pavement recently found in Palestrini, and quoted two lines from the Greek Anthologia. Dr. Adam Clarke particularly noticed that he gave the Greek rapidly, but the English with painful slowness, as if the Greek came more naturally. Then, apparently fancying himself under restraint, he walked out, and went into the African or Cole's coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill; there he would have fallen had he not caught hold of one of the brass rods of the boxes. Some wine and some jelly dissolved in brandy and water considerably roused him, but he could hardly speak, and the waiter took him back to the Institution in a coach. He expired exactly as the clock struck twelve, on the night of Sunday, September 25, 1808. He was buried in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, and eulogies of his talent, written in Greek and Latin verse, were affixed to his pall—an old custom not discontinued till 1822. His books fetched £2,000, and those with manuscript notes were bought by Trinity College. It was said of Porson that he drank everything he could lay his hands upon, even to embrocation and spirits of wine intended for the lamp. Rogers describes him going back into the dining-room after the people had gone, and drinking all that was left in the glasses. He once undertook to learn by heart, in a week, a copy of the Morning Chronicle, and he boasted he could repeat "Roderick Random" from beginning to end.
Mr. Luard describes Porson as being, in personal appearance, tall; his head very fine, with an expansive forehead, over which he plastered his brown hair; he had a long, Roman nose (it ought to have been Greek), and his eyes were remarkably keen and penetrating. In general he was very careless as to his dress, especially when alone in his chamber, or when reading hard; but "when in his gala costume, a smart blue coat, white vest, black satin nether garments, and silk stockings, with a shirt ruffled at the wrists, he looked quite the gentleman."
The street where, in 1261, many Jews were massacred, and where again, in 1264, 500 Jews were slain, was much affected by Nonconformists. There was a Baptist chapel here in the Puritan times; and in Queen Anne's reign the Presbyterians built a spacious church, in Meeting House Court, in 1701. It is described as occupying an area of 2,600 square feet, and being lit with six bow windows. The society, says Mr. Pike, had been formed forty years before, by the son of the excellent Calamy, the persecuted vicar of Aldermanbury, who is said to have died from grief at the Fire of London. John Shower was one of the most celebrated ministers of the Old Jewry Chapel. He wrote a protest against the Occasional Conformity Bill, to which Swift (under the name of his friend Harley) penned a bitter reply. He died in 1715. From 1691 to 1708 the assistant lecturer was Timothy Rogers, son of an ejected Cumberland minister, of whom an interesting story is told. Sir Richard Cradock, a High Church justice, had arrested Mr. Rogers and all his flock, and was about to send them to prison, when the justice's granddaughter, a wilful child of seven, pitying the old preacher, threatened to drown herself if the poor people were punished. The preacher blessed her, and they parted. Years after this child, being in London, dreamed of a certain chapel, preacher, and text, and the next day, going to the Old Jewry, saw Mr. Shower, and recognised him as the preacher of her dream. The lady afterwards told this to Mr. Rogers' son, when the lad turned Dissenter. Like many other of the early Nonconformist preachers, Rogers seems to have been a hypochondriac, who looked upon himself as "a broken vessel, a dead man out of mind," and eventually gave up his profession. Shower's successor, Simon Browne, wrote a volume of "Hymns," compiled a lexicon, and wrote a "Defence of the Christian Revelation," in reply to Woolston and other Freethinkers. Browne was also a victim to delusions, believing that God, in his displeasure, had withdrawn his soul from his body. This state of mind is said by some to have arisen from a nervous shock Browne had once received in finding a highwayman with whom he had grappled dead in his grasp. He believed his mind entirely gone, and his head to resemble a parrot's. At times his thoughts turned to self-destruction. He therefore abandoned his pulpit, and retired to Shepton Mallet to study. His "Defence" is dedicated to Queen Caroline as from "a thing."
Samuel Chandler, a celebrated author and divine, and a friend of Butler and Seeker, and Bowyer the printer, was for forty years another Old Jewry worthy. He lectured against Popery with great success at Salters' Hall, and held a public dispute with a Romish priest at the "Pope's Head," Cornhill. In a funeral sermon on George II., Chandler drew absurd parallels between him and David, which the Grub Street writers made the most of. Chandler's deformed sister Mary, a milliner at Bath, wrote verses which Pope commended.
In 1744 Richard Price, afterwards chaplain at Stoke Newington, held the lectureship at the Old Jewry. Price's lecture on "Civil Liberty," apropos of the American war, gained him Franklin's and Priestley's friendship; as his first ethical work had already won Hume's. Burke denounced him as a traitor; while the Corporation of London presented him with the freedom of the City in a gold box, the Congress offered him posts of honour, and the Premier of 1782 would have been glad to have had him as a secretary. The last pastor at the Old Jewry Chapel was Abraham Rees. This indefatigable man enlarged Harris's "Lexicon Technicum," improved by Ephraim Chambers, into the "Encyclopædia" of forty-five quarto volumes, a book now thought redundant and ill-arranged, and the philological parts defective. In 1808 the Old Jewry congregation removed to Jewin Street.
Dr. James Foster, a Dissenting minister eulogised by Pope, carried on the Sunday evening lecture in Old Jewry for more than twenty years; it was began in 1728. The clergy, wits, and freethinkers crowded with equal anxiety to hear him of whom Pope wrote—
"Let modest Foster, if he will, excel
Ten metropolitans in preaching well."
And Pope's friend, Lord Bolingbroke, an avowed Deist, commended Foster for the false aphorism—"Where mystery begins religion ends." Dr. Foster attended Lord Kilmarnock before his execution. He wrote in defence of Christianity in reply to Tindal, the Freethinker, and died in 1753. He says in one of his works:—"I value those who are of different professions from me, more than those who agree with me in sentiment, if they are more serious, sober, and charitable." This excellent man was the son of a Northamptonshire clergyman, who turned Dissenter and became a fuller at Exeter.