of the conjectures. It was the gift of a copy of Toup's Longinus that first inclined Porson to classical research.
Toup's talents were employed without cessation. Notes by him appeared in Sammet's edition of the ‘Epistolæ’ of Æschines (1771), in the second edition of John Shaw's Apollonius Rhodius (1779), in William Bowyer's edition of Bentley on the Epistles of Phalaris (1777), in the Oxford edition of Cicero ‘de officiis’ (1821), and in the edition by J. C. Orellius of the ‘Anecdota of Procopius Cæsariensis.’ He had long meditated an issue of Polybius, and had made extensive annotations for that purpose.
The admonition of Warburton to the bishop of Exeter bore fruit. When Toup was more than sixty years old he was appointed by Bishop Keppel on 14 May 1774 to a prebendal stall at Exeter, and, on the bishop's nomination, was admitted on 29 July 1776 to the vicarage of St. Merryn, the parish in which he had been partly educated. These preferments he held, with his rectory, to his death, and on 20 July 1776 he was complimented by his appointment as chaplain to his old friend, Bishop Hurd of Lichfield. His protracted labours weakened his intellectual powers, and for some years before his death he was imbecile (Dr. Parr, Works, i. 534). He was unmarried, and after his mother's death he was cared for by his half-sister, Mrs. Blake, and her three daughters, the eldest of whom was Phillis Blake. He died at St. Martin's rectory on 19 Jan. 1785, and was buried under the communion table of the church. A small marble tablet was erected to his memory on the south wall of the church by Miss Phillis Blake, and the inscription on a round brass plate beneath records that the cost was defrayed by the delegates of the University Press, Oxford.
Toup's library was sold, with the Spanish books of Dr. Robertson, on 10 May 1786 and five following days. Many of the books contained manuscript notes by him, and some of them are now at the British Museum. His copy of Küster's ‘Suidas,’ full of his notes, was acquired by the university of Oxford. Toup bequeathed to the Clarendon Press his manuscript notes on Polybius, and Phillis Blake gave the rest of his papers. They are now at the Bodleian Library. She presented to Warton the copy of his edition of Theocritus which belonged to Toup. Sir N. H. Nicolas, in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ 1823, ii. 326–8, promised to print the letters in his possession which had been written to Toup by some of the most learned scholars of the day, and Edward Richard Poole, B.A., F.S.A., issued in 1828 proposals for publishing a volume of similar letters, but both promises were broken. Toup's correspondence from 1747 to 1770 formed lot 1249 in the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps's manuscripts which were sold by Sotheby & Wilkinson in June 1896. Transcripts of and extracts from letters addressed to him by Dr. Askew and others, and copies of a few letters by Toup himself, are in Addit. MS. 32565 at the British Museum, which formerly belonged to the Rev. John Mitford. His letters to Jean d'Orville are in MS. 17363 at the Bodleian Library (Madan, Western MSS. iv. 128). The unpublished sermon by Toup, which was formerly in Dawson Turner's collection, is now in the Dyce Library at South Kensington Museum, where is also a copy, with manuscript notes by him, of the 1614 edit. of the dissertations of Maximus Tyrius (Dyce, Cat. i. 8, ii. 69). A letter by him is in Harford's ‘Thomas Burgess,’ pp. 29–30.
A harsh and in some respects inaccurate account of Toup was contributed to the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ 1786, ii. 652–4, but it allows that he was very charitable to the poor of his parish. He lived apart, without sufficient personal intercourse with other scholars, and this isolation led to excessive self-confidence. He possessed an ‘uncompromising independence of mind and a hatred of servility,’ and censure of others was with him more frequent than praise. His name appears among the seven great classical scholars in England during the eighteenth century that were lauded by Burney, and he is said to have enjoyed a ‘peculiar felicity in discovering allusions and quotations’ (European Mag. vii. 410–11). Latin lines on him by the Rev. Stephen Weston are in Nichols's ‘Literary Anecdotes,’ ix. 496; but an article by that critic in the ‘Archæologia,’ xiv. 244–8, on the Ogmian Hercules of Lucian, deals severely with an emendation suggested by him. Parr spoke of the faulty Latin of Toup and some other great scholars in England (Parr, Works, vii. 385–403; Wordsworth, Scholæ Academicæ, pp. 93–100).
