His birthplace was Stockton in the county of Durham. By profession a conveyancer, he enjoyed leisure for literary pursuits by his income from an official appointment. During the twenty years from 1782 to 1802 his time and talents were incessantly employed in the publication of his various works, antiquarian and critical. His first notable critique was his _Observations_ on Warton’s _History of English Poetry_, in the shape of a letter to the author (1782), in which his critical zeal seems to have been in excess of his literary amenity. Of other literary productions may be enumerated his _Remarks on the Commentators of Shakspere_; _A Select Collection of English Songs, with a Historical Essay on the Origin and Progress of National Songs_ (1783); _Ancient Songs from the Time of King Henry III. to the Revolution_ (1790), reprinted in 1829--perhaps the most valuable of his archæological labours; _The English Anthology_ (1793); _Ancient English Metrical Romances_, and _Bibliographia Poetica_, a catalogue of English poets from the 12th to the 16th century, inclusive, with short notices of their works. These are only some of the productions of his industry and genius. We give the origin of his adhesion to the Humanitarian Creed as recorded by himself in one of the chapters of his Essay, in which, also, he introduces the name of an ardent and well-known humanitarian reformer:-- “Mr. Richard Phillips,[206] the publisher of this compilation, a vigorous, healthy, and well-looking man, has desisted from animal food for upwards of twenty years; and the compiler himself, induced to serious reflection by the perusal of Mandeville’s _Fable of the Bees_, in the year 1772, being the 19th year of his age, has ever since, to the revisal of these sheets [1802], firmly adhered to a milk and vegetable diet; having, at least, never tasted, during the whole course of those thirty years, any flesh, fowl, or fish, or anything, to his knowledge, prepared in or with those substances or any extract from them, unless, on one occasion, when tempted by wet, cold, and hunger in the south of Scotland, he ventured to eat a few potatoes dressed under roasted flesh, nothing less repugnant to his feelings being obtainable; or, except by ignorance or imposition, unless, it may be, in eating eggs, which, however, deprives no animal of life, although it may prevent some from coming into the world to be murdered and devoured by others.”[207]