THE REV. Robert Houseman was born at Skerton near Lancaster, on the 25th of February, 1759, in the house now occupied by his brother, William Houseman, Esq., the property having been in the family for some centuries. He was educated at the Free Grammar School in Lancaster, under the tuition of the Rev. James Watson; and about the age of fourteen was bound apprentice to Mr. Barrow, a surgeon, who afterwards obtained a Scotch diploma and practised as a Physician. The pursuit of surgery being, however, on many accounts, extremely offensive to Mr. Houseman, he after three years, abandoned the idea of entering the medical professiondirected his attention to the Church -and, with a view to prepare for the labours of the University, again placed himself under the able tuition of Mr. Watson, with whom he remained until his departure for Cambridge. During this period of his life he produced several pieces of poetry, which were collected into a manuscript

*We are indebted for this account principally to the Lancaster Gazette of May 5, 1838, to a valuable Sermon preached at St. Anne's, on occasion of Mr. Houseman's death, by the Rev. James Statter, and to some recollections of a friend who had been honoured by an acquaintance with the deceased for nearly half a century.

volume, at present in the possession of his nephew, the Rev. William Higgin, M.A., Rector of Roscrea, in Ireland. These poems display considerable elegance of mind, and might perhaps justify a persuasion that the vision and the faculty divine' were his. The taste which thus exhibited itself in the season of youth, was occasionally indulged, for the gratification of particular friends, in later life.

Mr. Houseman, upon leaving Mr. Watson, repaired to Cambridge; was entered of St. John's College; and having passed respectably through the then usual course of academical study, took his degree of Bachelor of Arts; was admitted to Deacon's orders at a private ordination at York; and became curate to the Rev. Mr. Croft, Vicar of Gargrave, in Yorkshire. Mr. Croft, who had been a private pupil of Garrick with a view to the theatrical profession, was justly esteemed one of the finest readers in England; and it is to the peculiar advantages enjoyed by Mr. Houseman during his residence at Gargrave, that the excellence of his own mode of reading, and the well-known propriety of his pulpit manner, may be in part at least referred. In these respects Mr. Houseman was pre-eminent; all who knew him

while his voice and strength were equal to the exertion, will bear ready testimony to the finished beauty of his performance of the established service of the Church of England, and to the chaste and solemn delivery of his ministerial addresses. Whatever other advantages he might fail to obtain at Gargrave, it was certainly that he became skilled in the very important art of elocution; and it is especially worthy of notice, that though his voice was by no means powerful, he yet by judicious management commanded the attention of very large congregations. This was remarkably the case during his ministrations in the large church of St. Martin, Leicester, where he was heard with most fixed attention by an immense congregation for some years.

From Gargrave, Mr. Houseman removed to Cambridge, in whose immediate neighbourhood he afterwards held a small curacy. Here he was introduced to a highly respectable family of the name of Audley, one of the members of which, a young and lovely woman of independent property, shortly afterwards became his wife. By this marriage he had one son, whose birth the mother did not survive many days.

We are not exactly informed at what period Mr. Houseman embraced those views of religion which for above half a century he fully and ably proclaimed; but he publicly stated that it was from Mr. Simeon that he received, if not his first, yet his deepest religious impressions, and was often wont to refer to him as an instrument in the hand of God, of great good to his soul. It is however stated that before his union with Miss Audley, his zeal in promulgating what he considered the essential doctrines of religion, deprived him of some advantages he had reason to expect from his own college, and that a sermon which

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intimacy with many of the brightest ornaments of the Church of England-with men, whose names are coeval with the revival of that Church from a state of spiritual slumber and indifference-the Romains, the Venns, the Newtons, the Scotts of days gone by-and he formed perhaps the last, or almost the last link in the chain, which connects our own times with theirs. With that man of God, the Rev. C. Simeon, he was, in his early days, most closely associated. They were often of the party of young students and inquirers after truth, who met at the house of the Rev. H. Venn, of Yelling. Indeed, though in some respects there was a strong contrast between them, yet in many parts of their history, character, and religious views, it might easily be shewn, there was a striking resemblance. In addition to the correspondence in their religious opinions, and their mutual determination, in their public ministry,

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to know nothing but Christ and him crucified," they both, though in different situations, devoted themselves chiefly to one object: Mr. Simeon to the work of preparing young men for the ministry-Mr. Houseman to the ministry of the gospel in his native town. At the commencement of their career, they had each to contend with much persecution for the truth's sake, and each lived to see the