towards the so-called ‘Cæsar's Camp.’ Here he entertained select parties on weekdays, and kept open house for guests of every variety on Sunday. His four-o'clock dinners were very substantial, and followed by a dessert from the fruit which he raised with great skill, and by ample supplies of port and madeira. Among the guests were Thurlow, Erskine, and Lord Camelford. Other visitors were Bentham (Bentham, Works, x. 404); Coleridge (Table Talk, 8 May 1830, and 16 Aug. 1833); Mackintosh, who had become known to him as his supporter in the Westminster election of 1790 (Mackintosh, Life, i. 71); Godwin (see Paul, Godwin, i. 71) and Paine, both of whom he ridiculed; Gilbert Wakefield; Alexander Geddes [q. v.], the freethinking catholic priest, and William Bosville [q. v.] Horne Tooke, though he became abstemious in later years, often drank freely, and Stephens records disputes with Porson and Boswell, both settled by drinking matches. In both cases Horne Tooke left his antagonists under the table (Stephens, ii. 319, 439). Sir Francis Burdett, his neighbour at Wimbledon, introduced James Paull [q. v.], who became a regular guest for a time; but on the duel between Burdett and Paull in 1807, Horne Tooke published a pamphlet (‘A Warning to the Electors of Westminster’) denouncing Paull with great severity (see Stephens, ii. 291–334, for an account of the Wimbledon society). Horne Tooke suffered from a local affection from early youth, and became a martyr to gout and other diseases in his later years. He bore his sufferings with much courage, and his mind remained active to the last. He still read voraciously when in tolerable health, and talked calmly of his approaching death. He prepared a tomb to be placed in his garden. It was to be covered by a large block of black Irish marble which Chantrey had procured for him. He died at Wimbledon on 18 March 1812, and desired to be buried under this tomb, over which Burdett was to pronounce a classical oration. The inscription gave simply his name with the dates of birth and death, and added ‘content and grateful.’ It was decided, however, that the tomb would ‘deteriorate the value of his estate,’ and he was therefore buried at Ealing with the usual ceremony. His will bequeaths all his property to his daughter Mary Hart. She and her sister were, it is said, ‘eminently respectable and correct,’ and the omission from his will of the name of the younger implied no resentment. Horne Tooke had also a son named Montague, who was in the East India Company's service.
Horne Tooke is described as a sturdy and muscular man, 5 feet 8½ inches in height. He was ‘comely,’ with a keen eye, and dressed like a substantial merchant. A portrait by Richard Brompton [q. v.], painted during his imprisonment in 1777, is now in the possession of the Rev. Benjamin Gibbons. A bust of him was executed by the elder Bacon for Sir F. Burdett. Another was made during his last illness by Chantrey, and is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. A portrait by Mr. S. Percy was in the exhibition of 1803 (Stephens, ii. 503). A portrait in the National Portrait Gallery is attributed to Thomas Hardy, though his fellow-prisoner of that name can hardly have been the painter.
Horne Tooke has suffered in reputation from the hard fate which forced into holy orders a man eminently qualified for a career at the bar. His boundless pugnacity and his shrewdness in legal warfare would have made him a dangerous rival of Dunning and Kenyon. He seems to have been far the shrewdest of the agitators made conspicuous by the Wilkes controversies. He was apparently quite honest, though his public spirit was stimulated by his litigious propensities and love of notoriety. His politics were rather cynical than sentimental. He was a type of the old-fashioned British radical, who represented the solid tradesman's jealousy of the aristocratic patron rather than any democratic principle. He appealed to Magna Charta and the revolution of 1688; ridiculed the ‘rights of man’ theorists; and boasted with some plausibility that he was in favour of anything established. He was even, according to Stephens (ii. 477), a ‘great stickler for the church of England,’ on the ground, that is, of practical utility, and its doctrine correctly interpreted by Hoadly or Paley, not by the orthodox divines.
As a philologist, Horne Tooke deserves credit for seeing the necessity of studying Gothic and Anglo-Saxon, and learnt enough to be much in advance of Johnson in that direction; although his views were inevitably crude as judged by a later standard. His philology was meant to subserve a characteristic philosophy. Locke, he said, had made a happy mistake when he called his book an essay upon human understanding, instead of an essay upon grammar. Horne Tooke, in fact, was a thorough nominalist after the fashion of Hobbes; he especially ridiculed the ‘Hermes’ of Harris, and Monboddo, who had tried to revive Aristotelean logic; held that every word meant simply a thing; and that reasoning was the art
