Thomas Birch was born in the parish of St. John, Clerkenwell, on the twenty-third of November, 1705. His father was a quaker, coffee-mill maker, but the son’s fondness for learning early became so great, that, rather than follow the calling of his father, he left his home, became assistant in Hernel Hampstead school, and there received his education. He had hitherto adhered to the tenets of the quakers, but he now abandoned them, and was soon after ordained, by the bishop of Salisbury. He rose very rapidly in the church, and being honoured with the degree of a doctor of divinity, by the Marischal College of Aberdeen, he became a very considerable personage. He died by a fall from his horse, between London and Hampstead, on the ninth of January, 1766. Dr. Birch wrote the “Historical Memoirs and Lives” of Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh, Boyle, Tillotson, and Henry, Prince of Wales, besides a “History of the Royal Society,” of which he was one of the secretaries. He was a diligent explorer of records and public papers: he threw light on history, but was destitute of taste, and the skill of historical arrangement.

Personal

  The mental endowments of Dr. Birch were singular; he had a great eagerness after knowledge, and a memory very retentive of facts; but his learning, properly so called, bore no proportion to his reading; for he was in truth neither a mathematician, a natural philosopher, a classical scholar, nor a divine; but, in a small degree, all, and though lively in conversation, he was but a dull writer. Johnson was used to speak of him in this manner: “Tom is a lively rogue; he remembers a great deal, and can tell many pleasant stories; but a pen is to Tom a torpedo, the touch of it benumbs his hand and his brain: Tom can talk; but he is no writer.”… In the midst of all his labours and pursuits, Dr. Birch preserved an even temper of mind, and a great chearfulness of spirits. Ever desirous to learn, and willing to communicate, he was uniformly affable, courteous, and disposed to conversation. His life was spent without reproach, but terminated by an unhappy accident, a fall from his horse on the Hampstead road, on the 9th day of January, 1766.

General

  Dr. Birch being mentioned, he said, he had more anecdotes than any man. I said, Percy had a great many; that he flowed with them like one of the brooks here. Johnson.—“If Percy is like one of the brooks here, Birch was like the river Thames. Birch excelled Percy in that, as much as Percy excels Goldsmith.”

  Was a worthy, good-natured soul, full of industry and activity, and running about like a young setting-dog in quest of anything, new or old, and with no parts, taste, or judgment.

  Dr. Birch was a writer with no genius for composition, but one to whom British history stands more indebted than to any superior author; his incredible love of labour, in transcribing with his own hand a large library of manuscripts from originals dispersed in public and in private repositories, has enriched the British Museum by thousands of the most authentic documents of genuine secret history.

  An industrious and faithful Dryasdust.

  He collected a great amount of materials, literary and historical, and deserves honourable mention in any retrospect of British literature.

  Walpole’s censure, though exaggerated, rests on a bias of truth, but the fact remains that, in spite of their wearisome minuteness of detail and their dulness of style, the works of Dr. Birch are indispensable to the literary or historical student.