BRYANT (Jacon), a profound scholar, mytho logist, and sacred historian, born at Plymouth in 1713. His father bad a place in the Customs, and was af terwards stationed in Kent, where his son was first sent to a provincial school, from which he was re. moved to Eton. Here he appears to have remained till 1736, the date of his election to King's College, Cambridge, and he took his degrees of Bachelor and Master of Arts in 1740 and 1744. He returned to Eton iu the capacity of private tutor to the lat. Duke of Marlborough, then Marquis of Blandford; and the good taste which his pupil showed through life, in the protection of the fine arts, and in the pur suit of science, sufficiently demonstrated the benefe cial influence of his instructor's example. In 1756, he went to the Continent as Private Secretary to the Duke of Marlborough, then Master-General of the Ordnance, and Commander in Chief of the forces is Germany ; and be was rewarded, after his return, for his various services to the family, by a lucrative ap. pointment in the Ordnance, which allowed him am ple leisure to indulge his literary taste in a variety of refined investiptions, and to exercise his zeal for the cause of religion in a multitude of works, calculat ed for the illustration of the Scriptures, and the de . monstration of their authenticity and divine authority.
1. Hite-first publication was entitled Observatiosa and Inquiries relating to various parts of Ancient _History, containing Dissertations on the wind Euro . clydon, and on the Island Melite, together with as Account of-Egypt in its most early state, and of the Shepherd Kings, 1767. In this work he attempts I. prove that the Melite, on which St Paul was wreck ed, was not Malta, but one of the Illyrian islands is the Adriatic, now called Melede ; and he endeavours to illustrate several points in the early history of the oriental, and especially of the Araznitic nations.
4to, 1774, 1776. In this attempt, the author has equally displayed his deep and extensive learning, and his inventive fancy ; but it must be confessed that, on a minute examination, the work exhibits much more of a poetical imagination than of a sound • judgment, and that, in endeavouring to substitute etymological for historical evidence, he has bees completely unsuccessful. Nothing can afford a more satisfactory kind of proof than etymology taken on a large scale, and considered as a mode of tracing the relations of nations to each other, by the affini ties of their languages; since the accumulation of a multitude of probabilities, each weak when taken se parately, becomes at last equivalent to a certain ty. But nothing, on the ether hand, can be more fallacious, or more liable to controversy, than sin gle etymologicsil inferences, in particular cases, when one of these slight resemblances is magni fied into a striking likeness, and even an akin tity, which is then made the foundation of a msg. nificent superstructure in mythology or in history.
Mr Richardson has shown, in the Preface to his Dictionary, how much Mr Bryant was mistaken in some of his reasoning respecting the signification and derivation of particular words ; and even if he had been more correct in these instances, the con clusions, which he has deduced from his etymolo gies, would by no means have been perfectly legiti mate. Jablonsky seems to have exhibited one of the strongest examples of this dangerous abuse of learning ; in which he has been followed not only by Mr Bryant, but by several other modern writers equally visionary, who have commonly been very im perfectly acquainted with the languages on which their conjectures have depended, and have been still more deficient in that sort of common sense, and cor rect feeling, confirmed by experience, which consti tutes the most essential part of the qualifications of a critic, and the want of which can never be corn-. pensated by the most unwearied labour of a mere mechanical commentator.