Gents Mag 1849 part 1 p.93

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	Gentleman's Magazine 1849 part 1 p.93
obituary   Sir John Barrow
	Obituary, Sir John Barrow SIR JOHN BARROW, BART. Nov. 23. In New Street, Spring Gardens, in his 85th year, Sir John Barrow, Bart. LL.D. F.R.S. formerly Secretary to the Admiralty. The name of John Barrow will occupy an honourable place in the list of those highly gifted individuals who, by their original genius and energetic minds, have, in their different walks of life, rendered eminent services to their country. The friends of his childhood and youth did not provide him with more than the ordinary means of instruction, but he seized on those means with avidity and industry, and it was his self-education that mainly conferred on him those powers which, when the day of trial arrived, he turned to so good an account. He was born on the 19th June, 1764, in a small cottage at the village of Dragleybeck, near Ulverstone, North Lancashire, (as he has stated in his Autobiography published last year,) "being the only child of Roger and Mary Barrow. The said cottage had been in my mother's family nearly 200 years, and had descended to her aunt, who lived in it to the age of 80, and in it my mother died at the advanced age of 90. The only scholastic education I received was at the Town Bank Grammar School, under the Rev, William Tyson Walker, curate of the parish church, and an excellent classical scholar, educated at Trinity College, Dublin. I was entered when in my eighth year, and continued under his instruction until my thirteenth, when I had advanced to the head of the school; having read Homer, and Xenophon's Anabasis, Livy, Horace, Virgil, &c. From an old gentleman, who, being a sort of perambulating preceptor, used to pay his annual visit of about three months, I received instruction in those branches of mathematics which are most easily obtained under a master, such as algebra, fluxions, conic sections - Euclid needed no master; and I very soon had an opportunity of acquiring the practical application of many of the theorems and problems to the common purposes of life." At this early age he was engaged in taking a survey of Colonel Braddyl's estates in Yorkshire, and acquired so much knowledge of the theodolite, and the several mathematical instruments, then and subsequently, that, on arriving in London some years after, he drew up and published a small treatise to explain the practical use of them; this, he says, "being my first introduction to the press, for which I obtained 20l. and was not a little delighted to send my first fruits to my mother." Sir John Barrow's parents had some idea of educating him for the clerical profession, but he persuaded his father to give up the intention. A situation was then obtained for him at Liverpool as superintendent and clerk at an iron-foundry, in which he remained for two years, when he quitted it for a voyage to Greenland in a whaler, where he had some initiation in practical navigation and the duties of a seaman. His next employment was as mathematical teacher at Dr. James's academy, Greenwich, where among his pupils were two or three belonging to, or destined for, the navy, one the son of Lord Anson, and another the son of Lord Leveson Gower. From this service he was, through the interest of Sir George Staunton, who was secretary to the embassy destined for China, appointed on the effective list of Lord Macartney's suite, as "comptroller of the household," and nominally in that capacity, proceeded with his patron to China. He was thus enabled to put his foot on the first step of the ladder of ambition; but every subsequent step of his advancement in his distinguished career may be fairly said to have been achieved by himself. His talents and his zeal for the public service, when once known and placed in a fair field for action, could hardly fail of being appreciated and duly fostered by those distinguished statesmen under whom he successively served. It so happened, that the chiefs of the British mission to China in 1792, the Earl of Macartney and the late Sir George Staunton, were, in some respects, not so happily provided with active and talented associates as might have been wished; but in Mr. Alexander, the draughtsman of the embassy, they were fortunate in possessing a very able and diligent artist; and Mr. Barrow, from his various talents, and the zeal and alacrity with which he applied himself to every department of the service, although his own was only a subordinate one, was a host in himself. The authentic account of the embassy, published by the late Sir George Staunton, records many of Mr. Barrow's valuable contributions to literature and science connected with China. This work, therefore, together with his own subsequently published supplemental volume of travels, is ample evidence how well his time had been employed. Had no unpropitious political events occured to prevent the views and plans of the mission being carried out, it is not too much to say that the able and ingenious men who were employed in it would most probably have effected, by peaceful means, all those improvements in the terms of our intercourse with China, which, some fifty years after,
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