upon free-will, or versifies some prayer or letter that has struck him in reading memoirs or treatises of mystical divinity. The worthy Byrom, it must be added, did not take his own performances in this line too seriously. They were an amusement—a quaint whim characteristic of an oddly constituted brain; and one fancies that when he forces even Hebrew and Greek into the fetters of his 'cantering rhymes,' and twists dry grammatical discussion into comic metres, he feels that the process takes the bitterness out of controversy and enables him to treat thorny subjects in a vein of pleasantry. It is characteristic that he came into collision with the colossal Warburton, who had treated Law with his usual brutality, and that even Warburton found it desirable for once to be civil to so amiable an antagonist.
Byrom's activity in the shorthand business declined after the death of his brother in 1740 gave him the family estates. In 1745 he was presented to the Chevalier in Manchester; but luckily did not commit himself in any dangerous way to answering his own question, Which was King and which was Pretender? Byrom was very near the Quakers in such matters. In a
