Higgins

Higgins, MATTHEW JAMES, English essayist, better known by his principal nom de plume of 'Jacob Omnium,' was born at Benown, County Meath, Ireland, on 4th December 1810; was educated at Eton and New College, Oxford; and died at Kingston House, near Abingdon, on 14th August 1868. His intellectual force, his humour and irony were enlisted in the warfare against the abuses and backslidings and minor evils of social and public life, such as the heaping up of legal costs as sung by Thackeray. He wrote no great book, but was a steady contributor to a series of journals, such as the New Monthly Magazine, Morning Chronicle, Times, Cornhill, Edinburgh Review, Pall Mall Gazette, &c. He particu- larly 'excelled in the implication of the most pungent meaning in a demure simplicity of statement.' He was a man of gigantic stature—6 feet 8 inches high. A few of his sketches were collected by their author, and printed for private circulation in 1857. They appeared again, with others, as Essays on Social Subjects, with a Memoir by Sir W. Stirling Maxwell (1875).