rest of his writings are, Kitsur Piske Harrosh, epitome of the decisions of Rabbi Ásher, extracted from his larger works, and commonly printed with the Babylonian Talmud; Tosaphoth, or Additions; a Commentary upon the preceding; a Dissertation on the text, "There is no enchantment against Israel;" Sheeloth Uteshivoth, questions and answers, or forensic decisions, printed at Venice, A.D. 1552; Hannahagoth (Consuetudines), a book of admonitions to a pious life, printed at Mantua, A.D. 1623, at the end of the Tepuche Zahav of Rabbi Jechiel; Sepher Mathonoth, the Book of Gifts. He had several sons, of high reputation as Talmudic writers, but all their works have perished, except those of Rabbi Jacob, the author of the work entitled, Arba Turrim, the Four Orders. During the persecution of the Jews at Toledo, Rabbi Judas, another of the sons, slew himself, his wife, and the wife of his brother Jacob, together with others of his relations, to escape the brutality of the populace. Rabbi Asher died A. D. 1321. (Bartoloccius, in voce.)

ASHER, (Rabbi,) Ben Rabbi Peretz de Nicia, a printer of Hebrew books in the latter part of the fifteenth century.

ASHER, (Saul,) a Berlin Jew, of great learning, and engaged in the improvement of his fellow countrymen. He wrote on the Civic Amelioration of the Jews, Berlin, 1788; Der Deutsche Geistesaris Tocnatismus; and other works.

ASHFIELD, (Edmund,) an English painter in crayons, was the scholar of Michael Wright, and the instructor of Lutterel. His works were much esteemed, containing, as they did, a greater variety of tints than had been before introduced into that style of art. (Pilkington's Dict.)

ASHHURST, (Henry,) eminent for wealth, charity, and piety, was the third son of Henry Ashhurst, of Ashhurst, in Lancashire, Esq., a justice of the peace, puritanically inclined, of which he gave this evidence, that when king James had signified his pleasure that sports might be used on Sundays, he committed a person to prison, who endeavoured, by piping, to draw off people from public worship at a church near his house. His eldest son was a member of the long parliament; the second a colonel in the parliament army; and the third is the Henry Ashhurst, of whom we are to speak.

He was brought up to merchandise in the city of London, where he established

himself as a draper, in which trade he was eminently successful for thirty years. He was as noted for his liberality as for his acquisitions; and it flowed for the most part in the channel in which, while it relieved temporal wants, it ministered also to spiritual improvement. When many of the Puritan ministers were silenced by the operation of the Act for Uniformity, he assisted greatly the more necessitous of them. Schools for the education of the poor were particular objects of his bounty. He distributed to a great extent Bibles and other religious books. He appointed a person whose business it was to seek out in London, cases of distress proper to be relieved by him. In the attempt which was made to introduce a' knowledge of Christianity among the Indians in North America, of which Elliot was the principal instrument, he took an active part; and when finally the corporation was established for the Propagation of the Gospel, Mr. Ashhurst was appointed the treasurer, and a great part of the burden of that affair rested upon him. His character is drawn at large in a sermon preached at his funeral by the nonconforming minister, Richard Baxter. He died in 1680, being about sixty-three years of age.

He left four sons, of whom Sir Henry, the elder, was created a baronet, and was for many years a member of parliament; and the second, Sir William Ashhurst, was lord-mayor of London, and one of the members for the city in several parliaments.

ASHLEY, (Robert,) a miscellaneous writer of the reign of Elizabeth and James the First, of whom Wood has given an account in the Athenæ Oxoniensis. Wood calls him "an esquire's son and Wiltshire-man born;" but we are able to add, from certain notes on his life, written by himself, and to be found in the Sloane MSS. in the British Museum, called Additional MS. No. 2105, that he was born at Damerham, on the confines of the counties of Wilts, Hants, and Dorset, seven miles from the city of Salisbury: and that his father was Anthony Ashley, or Astley, of a knightly family in Dorset, and his mother, Dorothy Lyte, of Lytes Carey, in Somerset. He further tells us, that when he was a boy, he delighted in reading the stories of Bevis of Hampton; Guy, earl of Warwick; the History of Valentine and Orson; the Lives of Arthur, King of Britain, and the Knights of the Round Table; and that, when he

became a little older, he read the Deca meron of Boccace, and Octoemeron of the Queen of Navarre. He was at school under Hadrian Saravia at Southampton. Wood says, that he became a fellow-commoner of Hart hall, in 1580, and does not speak of his being a member of any other college in Oxford; but it appears by the sketch of his autobiography, that he was of Alban hall, and also of Magdalen college. When he left the university, which he did without taking a degree, he became a member of the Middle Temple, where in due course he was called to the bar, and for a while he followed the law as a profession. But the steady prosecution of the business of the law not suiting the mercurial turn of his mind, he gave it up, and applied himself to the study of the Dutch, French, Spanish, and Italian languages, in order that he might read the authors who had written in them, the stock of English miscellaneous literature being in his days soon exhausted.

We find the following works of his :1. Urania, or Celestial Muse, translated into Latin verse from the French of Du Bartas, published in 1589, and dedicated to Sir Henry Unton, of Wadley, knight. 2. Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things in the Whole World, translated from the French of Louis le Roy, fol. 1594, one of the very few books printed by Charles Yetsweirt, Esquire. 3. Almansor, the learned and victorious King, who conquered Spain, his Life and Death, 4to, 1627: this work is translated from the Spanish. 4. Cochin - China, containing many admirable Rarities and Singularities of that Country, extracted out of an Italian Relation, 4to, 1633, which Italian Relation is by Christophoro Barri, or Borri. 5. Il Davidi Perseguitate, David persecuted, 8vo, 1637, translated from the Italian of the Marquis Malvezzi. This was reprinted in 1647.

In the interval between the publication of his earlier and later works, he travelled much abroad, principally in Holland and France. He was also not unfrequently in prison in England. In the latter part of his life, he lived in the Middle Temple. He had no issue; and on his death, at the beginning of October, 1641, he gave many books to the library of that society. He was buried in the Temple church.

It appears, by certain notes on this family, written by Dodsworth, in vol. cliii. of his MSS. at the Bodleian, that he was a younger brother of Sir Anthony Ashley, a considerable person in the reigns of Elizabeth and James, going as

secretary to the earl of Essex, in the Cadiz expedition in 1596, when he was knighted; and serving also in the office of clerk of the council. This Sir Anthony left an only daughter and heir, named Anne, who carried a large estate to her husband, Sir John Cooper, Bart. and was mother of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury.

ASHLEY, (General C.) a violin player, was the son of the manager of the oratorios at Covent garden theatre, upon whose death his sons, General and Charles, succeeded him. General Ashley was educated in music under Giardini and Bartheleman, and was an excellent musician. He died at Pimlico, on the 21st of August, 1818. (Gent. Mag.)

ASHLEY, (John,) a major-general in the American army, was born about 1739, and graduated at Yale college in 1758. He distinguished himself on the occasion of the Shag's insurrection, and died on the 5th of November, 1799.

ASHLEY, (Jonathan,) an American divine, was born about the year 1713, graduated at Yale college in 1730, and was ordained minister of Denfield, Massachusetts, in 1738. He died in 1780, leaving some sermons.

ASHMOLE, (Elias,) the founder of the museum at Oxford, which still bears his name, was born at Lichfield, May 23, 1617. He was intended to have been named Thomas, but when the minister bade, “Name the child," his godfather answered, "Elias." His father, Simon Ashmole, was a saddler in Lichfield; his mother, the daughter of a woollen draper, of Coventry. In his earliest years, having been taught music, he became a chorister in Lichfield cathedral: and at sixteen, was taken into the family of James Paget, Esq. one of the barons of the Exchequer, who had married his mother's sister, and under whose advice he took to the law as a profession. In 1638, a few months after he had married his first wife, Elizabeth Mainwaring, he became a solicitor in chancery; and in February 1641, he was sworn an attorney in the Common Pleas. On December 5, in the same year, his wife died suddenly; upon which, and upon the Rebellion breaking out, Ashmole being a royalist, he retired to the house of his father-in-law, Mr. Peter Mainwaring, of Smallwood, in Cheshire. He afterwards turned soldier ; and in 1645 joined the king at Oxford, where he became one of the four gentlemen of the ordnance to the garrison. Here he entered of Brazennose college, and de

voted the hours which could be spared from the duties of his post to the study of natural philosophy. Here also an acquaintance contracted with Mr., afterwards Sir George, Warton, led him into the absurd mysteries of astrology. From Oxford he removed to Worcester, where he was commissioner, receiver, and registrar of the excise; and, soon after, a captain in Lord Ashley's regiment, and comptroller of the ordnance. In 1646, he lost his mother. His father had died in 1634. Grief, and the certainty that the king's affairs were now growing desperate, induced him again to retire into Cheshire, where he continued till the latter part of the year, and then came up to London. In 1647 we find him at Englefield in Berkshire, pursuing his studies and cultivating botany. In this retreat he became acquainted with Mary, the sole daughter of Sir William Forster, of Aldermaston, in the county of Berks, bart. who had been first married to Sir Edward Stafford, then to a Mr. Hamlyn, and lastly to Sir Thomas Mainwaring, knt. recorder of Reading, when an attachment took place, which was much and violently resented by Mr. Humphrey Stafford, lady Mainwaring's second son, who in one instance attempted to murder Mr. Ashmole. In the latter part of 1648, lady Mainwaring conveyed to Ashmole her estate at Bradfield; and on November 16, 1649, they were married. Ample means were now afforded to him in following his pursuits; and his house in London became the resort of learned, eminent, and scientific men. His second marriage, however, involved him in various law-suits; and at last produced a domestic dispute, which, as Ashmole himself states in his diary, came to a hearing in the court of Chancery, on October the 8th, 1657; when Sergeant Maynard having observed, that in eight hundred sheets of depositions taken on the part of lady Mainwaring, not so much as a bad word was proved against her husband; her bill was dismissed, and she delivered back to him. Ashmole, during the whole of these annoyances, continued ardent in the study of the hermetic science; in 1650, though without his name, he published a treatise of Dr. Dee's upon the Philosopher's Stone; and in 1652, with his name, a quarto volume, containing many pieces of our old hermetic philosophers, under the title of Theatrum Chymicum Britannicum.

Ashmole now devoted himself, jointly with chemistry, to the study of antiquity

and records; he accompanied Mr., after wards Sir William, Dugdale in his survey of the fens; and in 1658 began to collect materials for his History of the Order of the Garter. Soon after the restoration, he was appointed Windsor herald, June 18th, 1660: and on November the 2d in the same year was called to the bar. In 1668, Ashmole lost his second wife and soon after married his third, Elizabeth, the daughter of his friend, Sir William Dugdale. His History of the Order of the Garter, on which his reputation as an antiquary chiefly rests, was presented to the king, May 8th, 1672; who, as a mark of approbation, rewarded him with a privy seal for 400l. In 1675 he resigned the office of Windsor herald; and in 1677, upon Sir Edward Walker's death, might have been made garter king of arms, but waived the appointment in favour of Sir William Dugdale, his father-in-law.

Ashmole was twice invited to represent his native city in parliament, and would have been successful the second time, in 1685, had not king James II. induced him to resign his interest to a Mr. Lewson. He died May 18th, 1692; and was interred at Lambeth.

Ash

Ashmole's manuscripts and library, together with the collection of rarities which he had received from the Tradescants (see the name), were transferred by him in 1682, to the building which the university of Oxford had just completed, as a repository for curiosities. mole's Diary, published from this collection in 1717, and reprinted at the end of Lilly's History of his Life and Times, in 1774, abounds so much in absurd and whimsical facts as to be almost an injustice to Ashmole's memory. His History of Berkshire, in 3 vols, 8vo, republished in folio, was posthumous, and too meagre a compilation from his papers to do him credit. Beside the manuscripts at Oxford, several volumes of Ashmole's collections on chemistry and alchemical science are preserved among Sir Hans Sloane's manuscripts in the British Museum; one of them is his own transcript of Dr. Dee's Liber Mysteriorum, the account of his conference with angels.

ASHMORE, (John,) an English poet of the early part of the seventeenth century, of whom only one work remains, entitled, Certain selected Odes of Horace Englished, and their Arguments annexed; with Poems, ancient and modern, of divers subjects, translated: whereunto are added, both in Latin and English, sundry new Epigrams, Anagrams, and Epitaphs.

4to, 1621. It appears by the subjects of several of the poems, that the author lived in the part of Yorkshire about Ripon. Some account of this rare volume may be seen in the Censura Literaria, vol. ii. p. 411.

ASHMUN, (Jehudi,) who was agent in Liberia to the American Colonization Society, was born at Champlain, New York, in April, 1794; graduated at Burlington college in 1816; and was elected professor in the theological seminary at Bangor, Maine. In this situation, however, he continued for only a short period; and removing to the district of Columbia, joined the episcopal church, and undertook the conduct of the Theological Review. It was at this time that he wrote the Memoirs of the Rev. Samuel Bacon. He also published the first number of a periodical journal for the American Colonization Society; but the work failed from want of support. He was then appointed to conduct a reinforcement to Liberia, for which he embarked on the 19th June, 1822, and arrived at Cape Montserado on the 8th August. On his arrival, by the authority of the society, he took upon himself the office of agent, which he performed with great skill and ability-passing laws, and even superintending the erection of fortifications for the protection of the colonists. He suffered considerably from ill health; and before he had recovered from a severe illness with which he had been afflicted, the settlement was attacked by the savages, who were, although numerically superior, repulsed, and, on their again resuming the conflict, utterly defeated. He was, however, at length compelled-greatly to the regret of the colonists-to return to America, to recruit his health. He arrived at Newhaven on the 10th August, 1828; having been landed at St. Bartholomew. He died a fortnight afterwards, (August 25.) Besides his Memoirs of Mr. Bacon, he published some papers in the (American) Repository.

ASHMUNI, (Ali-ben-Mohammed,) the author of a commentary on the Isagoge of Porphyry.

ASHRAF-SHAH, son of Meer Abdullah, succeeded as king of Persia, then conquered by the Ghilji Affghans, on the death of his cousin, Meer Mahmood Shah, April 1725. His reign was at first popular, as he endeavoured to heal the wounds inflicted by the cruelty of his predecessor. He gained a victory over the Turks, which led to an advantageous peace with the Porte; but he sustained

a defeat at Dameghan, from the famous Nadir-Kooli, who had taken arms in Khorassan, in the name of the Soofavi prince Tahmasp; and a second overthrow, in which his entrenched camp was stormed by the Persians, compelled him to abandon Ispahan. A third defeat near Istakhr, (the ancient Persepolis,) reduced his fortunes to the lowest ebb; and in the fear of being delivered up by his own followers to Nadir, he attempted to escape through Seistan to his native country of Affghanistan, but was cut off in the desert, and his head sent to Tahmasp, a.d. 1730. With his life ended the short but destructive rule of the Affghans in Persia. (Hanway. Malcolm. Sheikh Ali Hazin.)

ASHRAF, (Malek al) the son of Timur Tash, and grandson of Júbán, chief emir of Abusaid Khan, Tartar sovereign of Persia. Malek Ashraf, inheriting the rebellious spirit of his father, seized upon the Tartar possessions in Persia, and used the power thus acquired with so little moderation, that many of his subjects fled from his tyranny to the protection of Jani Beg Khán, governor of Kapchak. One of these, expounding the Koran in the mosque, in the presence of Jani Beg, spoke of the scandalous life of Malek Ashraf, and declared that he, and the rest of the tyrant's subjects, would bear witness against his royal hearer in the day of judgment, if he neglected to do what was in his power to repress these enormities. Jani Beg was terrified by this threat, or, perhaps more truly, was glad of a pretext for extending his dominions. He invaded the territories of Malek Ashraf, whom he defeated and slew, (A. D. 1355), took possession of his kingdom, and gained a booty, it is said, of 400 camel's loads of goods and jewels.

ASHTON, (Charles, D. D.) an eminent scholar of the eighteenth century, was one of twelve children of Robert and Dorothy Ashton, of Bradway, a hamlet of the parish of Norton, in the northern parts of Derbyshire, where they lived in matrimony more than sixty years. He was baptized in the parish church of Norton, May 25, 1665, and admitted of Queen's college, Cambridge, 18th May, 1682. He was elected fellow on the 30th of April, 1687. He took orders, became chaplain to Patrick, bishop of Ely, by whom he was presented to the rectory of Rattenden, in Essex. He was also, for a while, chaplain to Chelsea Hospital; but this appointment he resigned, a prebendal stall in Ely being given to him, and

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His reading was chiefly in the writings of the ancients, and especially the fathers, so that he had made great attainments in ecclesiastical antiquities and chronology. He wrote various treatises connected with these subjects, published without his name, and he is best known and remembered by an edition of Justin Martyr, prepared by him for the press, and published after his death by Mr. Kellett.

ASHTON, (Thomas,) born in 1631, was educated at Brazennose college, Oxford, of which he was elected a fellow. He was, from Wood's account, "a forward and conceited scholar, and became a malapert preacher in and near Oxford." He was near being expelled for an offensive sermon preached by him in St. Mary's, and was obliged to quit his fellowship from some quarrel with the principal of his college. He died soon after the restoration. He published two works, of which the commencements of the titles (themselves almost pamphlets) are, Blood-thirsty Cyrus unsatisfied with Blood; or the boundless Cruelty of an Anabaptist's Tyranny; and Satan in Samuel's Mantle; or the Cruelty of Germany acted in Jersey. They were levelled against Colonel Mason, the governor of Jersey. (Biog. Brit. Wood, Ath).

ASHTON, (Thomas,) born in 1716, was educated at Eton, and went from thence to King's college, Cambridge. He was a friend of Horace Walpole, who addressed a letter to him from Florence in 1740, published in his works. He was elected preacher at Lincoln's-inn in 1762, but resigned it in 1764. He died in 1775. He was a popular preacher, and published several of the sermons he delivered on public occasions. He also published some tracts relating to the election of aliens into the vacancies at Eton college. (See Lord Orford's Works. Nicol's Life of Bowyer. Cole's MSS. in Brit. Mus.)

ASHWELL, (George,) was born in 1612. He was admitted of Wadham college in 1627, where he was elected fellow. He died in 1693. He published,

ASHWELL, (John,) prior of Newnham abbey, near Bedford, has had his name preserved by George Joye, one of the English Protestant reformers in the reign of king Henry VIII., who published, while in exile at Strasburgh, a copy of a letter which Ashwell had addressed to his diocesan, the bishop of Lincoln, concerning the errors maintained by Joye, then fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, together with Joye's answer to the same. The title of this rare and curious tract may be read in Lowndes' Bibliographer's Manual, and some account of the contents of it in the Retrospective Review, vol. ii. of the New Series, page 96.

ASHWELL, (Thomas,) a church composer of the time of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. Many of his works are still preserved at Oxford. (Dict. of Mus.)

ASHWORTH, (Caleb, D. D.) was born, not in Northamptonshire, as is said in the General Biographical Dictionary of Alexander Chalmers, but in Lancashire, where his father, Richard Ashworth, was the pastor of a congregation of Baptist Dissenters, at a place called Clough-Fold, in Rossendale, in the wilder parts of the county. There his father died in 1751, at the age of eighty-four. He had three sons, all of whom were ministers among the Protestant Dissenters, but only this son attained to any eminence. He was born in 1721; became a student for the dissenting ministry in an academy at Northampton, over which Dr. Doddridge presided, in 1739, at which time he was only eighteen years of age, which renders improbable another statement in the work above alluded to, that he had been brought up to the business of a carpenter. It is certain that he passed with much credit through the course of study prescribed at Northampton. In 1746 he became minister of a dissenting congregation at Daventry; first as assistant to an old minister there, and afterwards as the sole minister. In this connexion he continued till his death, which happened on July 18, 1775.