CLARKE, ADAM, LL.D. A celebrated Wes leyan divine, born of humble parents in the north of Ireland, 1762. Owing to the poverty of their circumstances his education was extremely limited, and though, by dint of unwearied energy and per severance, he afterwards became remarkable for the extent and variety of his learning, it may be doubted if he ever thoroughly supplied his early deficiencies. His parents were Methodists, and members of the congregation of Breedon, the friend of Wesley, through whose influence young Adam was introduced to the notice of Wesley himself, and admitted to a school founded by him at Kingswood, near Bristol. He had previously been apprenticed to a linen manufacturer, but had left on finding the business uncongenial to his studious habits. While at school he got hold of a Hebrew grammar, which gave him the first im pulse to the study of that and the cognate languages for which he was afterwards famous. In 1782 he was ordained by Wesley himself, and sent as an itinerant preacher to the neighbourhood of Brad ford, Wilts. Subsequently he came to London, and was much followed as a preacher. The uni versity of St. Andrews gave him the degree of M. A.
and of D.D. In 1802 he published his Biblio graphical Dictionary, which gained him a great reputation, so that he was even selected by the Record commission to edit Rymer's Effdera, a task to which he confesses he was unequal. He, how ever, laboured at it sedulously for some years, and the first vol. and part of the second was published with his name, after which he retired. He also wrote Lives of the Wesley Family, in which he strangely suggested an Arabic origin for that name. But his great work, to which all his studies were subsidiary, was his Commentary on the Holy Scrip tures, of which the first vol. appeared in 1810, and the eighth and last in 1826. This excited much attention, from the peculiarity of opinions expressed in it on the subject of the Fall. It is, however, that on which his fame still rests, and must be re garded as a valuable contribution to biblical litera ture. Dr. Clarke was the means of establishing a Methodist mission to the Shetland Isles. He also founded schools in his native province of Ulster some time before his death by cholera in r832.— S. L.