the Rev. W. Turner , Jun. , MA., Lives of the eminent Unitarians

Dr. John Aikin, first classical, and afterwards for many years theological, tutor in the academy at Warrington, well deserves commemoration, as the person to whom that institution owed, if not its chief celebrity, its highest claims to distinction as a seminary of sound and useful learning. He was born in London, December 28, 1713. His father was a native of Kirkcudbright, in Scotland, who settled in London as a linen-draper, and married the daughter of a London citizen. Young Aikin was originally intended for his father's business, but was afterwards transferred to a merchant's counting-house as foreign clerk; in the exercise of which duty he acquired a thorough mastery of and facility in the French tongue, for which he was afterwards remarkable. Here, however, he cannot have remained for any great length of time, for a rooted passion for literature and a delicate state of health seem to have led to an early change in his destination. He was sent to a school at St. Albans, kept by an ingenious man who had been on the stage, and was fond of exercising his pupils in theatrical declamation; which circumstance may probably have tended to strengthen an early taste for poetry, and also to cultivate that force and clearness of enunciation for which the subject of this memoir was afterwards eminently distinguished. In 1732 he was removed to Dr. Doddridge's academy at Northampton, but probably not, in the first instance, with a view to the Christian ministry, as there is reason to believe that he was at one time intended for the legal profession. At all events, his attention was for some time closely directed to studies of this kind; as he possessed a deep and extensive knowledge