Harris,

Harris, JAMES, a pre-scientific philologist, was born at Salisbury, July 20, 1709. His mother was a sister of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, author of the Characteristics. He had his education in his native city and at Wadham College, Oxford, whence he passed to the study of law at Lincoln's Inn. Finding himself at twenty-four on his father's death master of an ample fortune, he devoted himself to the assiduous study of the classics, but in 1761 he entered parliament, and later became Lord of the Admiralty, of the Treasury, and secretary and comptroller to Queen Charlotte. In 1744 he published a volume consisting of three treatises, on art, on music, painting, and poetry, and on happiness; and in 1751 his famous Hermes, an interesting but scarce profitable inquiry into the philosophical basis of universal grammar. His incomplete Philosophical Arrangements, a study of the Aristotelian logic, was issued in 1775; and his Philological Inquiries on style and the true canons of literary criticism, in three parts—the last written in French (1780–89). He died in December 1780. Harris's works were collected, with a short life, by his son, the first Earl of Malmesbury (2 vols. 4to, 1801; 5 vols. 8vo, 1803).