BROWNE

Simon, a learned and ingenious Di enting divine, remarkable for an extraordinary species of mental derangement, was bom in 1680; died 1732. He preach^ for some time at Portsmouth, afterwards at the Old Jewry, one of the principal congregations of Di enters in London. Here he published a volume of hymns and one of sennons. In 1723 the lo of his wife and only son threw him into a settled melancholy, attended with the persuasion that God had annihUated in him the thinking substance, and utterly divested him of consciousne ; and that although he retained the human shape, and the faculty of speaking in a manner that appeaired to others rational, he had all the while no more notion of what he said than a parrot. He therefore thought himself no longer a moral agent, or subject of reward or punishment, and, desisting from his functions, could not be prevsdied upon to join in any act of worship, public or private. Notwithstanding this alienation of mind, his faculties in other respects were in full vigour, which he proved by various publications, including the compilation of dictionary, lliis, he observed, 'was nothing that required a reasonable f^ul.' Discourses, two vols. 8vo, 1722.