We conclude with a few scattered notices of the character and person of this excellent man. His habits, it will readily be supposed, were very laborious. Dr. Pope, in his Life of Bishop Ward, says that during winter Barrow would rise before light, being never without a tinder-box, and that he has known him frequently rise after his first sleep, light and burn out his candle, and then return to bed before day. In pecuniary affairs he was generous in the extreme. Of his liberality to his college we have already spoken. We may add that, being appointed to two ecclesiastical preferments, he bestowed the profits of both in charity, and resigned them as soon as he became master of Trinity. He left no property but books and unpublished manuscripts. Pure in his morals, he was the farthest possible from moroseness; amiable, lively, and witty in his temper and conversation, he was impatient of any looseness, irreverence, or censoriousness of speech, “being of all men,” says Dr. Tillotson, in his Address to the Reader, “I ever had the happiness to know, the clearest of this common guilt, and most free from offending in word; coming as near as it is possible for human frailty to do, to the perfect idea of St. James, his _perfect man_.”
His figure was low and spare, but of uncommon strength; and his courage, devoid of all alloy of quarrelsomeness, was approved in more than one instance related by the biographers of his peaceful life. It was among his peculiarities that he never would sit for his portrait; but some of his friends found means to have it taken without his knowledge, while they engaged his attention in discourse. There is a full length of him in the hall of Trinity, in fit conjunction with those of Newton and Bacon.
The earliest authority for Barrow’s life is a short memoir by his friend and executor, Mr. Hill, prefixed to the first edition of his works. Mr. Ward added some particulars, in his Lives of the Gresham Professors. The fullest accounts are to be found in the second edition of the Biographia Britannica, and in the life prefixed to Mr. Hughes’s edition of his theological works. In this the editor has given an analysis of the contents of each piece, calculated to assist the student to a thorough understanding of the author’s train of argument.