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On 23 February 1771, a letter appeared in the St James's Chronicle concerning the death, a few months before, of the archdeacon of London:
'What may be the reason,' said a Gentleman the other day, 'that the demise of Dr. Jortin, the first scholar of his country, and perhaps of his age, has been so little noticed? Why are we stunned with the eulogies of a Secker, and a Whitefield? And why is even a Sterne busted and bronzed, while the remains of a man, to whom Dr. Browne's colossus was less than a pigmy, are consigned to the dust with as little noise and ceremony, as if the crowner's quest-law had found him felo de se?'1
The urgency of that question is, of necessity, not now what it then was, but its resolution has considerable interpretative implications for an understanding of the scholarly and religious culture of eighteenth-century England. In the figure of John Jortin (1698-1770), the deep interpenetration of learning and scholarship with ideals of civil and religious liberty, which animated much public debate, can be identified and analysed. The Republic of Letters, of which Jortin was a distinguished citizen, continued to influence the politics of church and state throughout his lifetime.
The provenance of the letter in the St James's Chronicle is itself revealing. Thomas Hollis, bibliophile and sponsor of the eighteenth-century Commonwealth revival of which the late Caroline Robbins remains the major modern chronicler, had inspired like-minded writers, both lay and clerical, to write to London newspapers on matters of civil and religious liberty in the 1760s.2Hollis and his clerical allies, Anglican and dissenting, had launched an assault on the ecclesiastical politics of Thomas Secker, the orthodox archbishop of Canterbury, interpellated by them as an ally of Bute and other leaders of what they considered to be the tory reaction initiated by the accession of George III.3The animus against Secker betrayed in the letter can be immediately placed. Similarly, George Whitefield's 'Enthusiasm' as a leader of the evangelical revival placed him directly at odds with the self-consciously reasonable Christianity which Hollis and his allies, both within and outside the Church of England, promoted. Laurence Sterne and John Browne...