LOWTH, Robert (1710-1787), bishop of London, was born at Buriton, Hampshire, or, according to other authorities, in the Close of Winchester, on November 27, 1710. He was the younger son of Dr William Lowth (1661-1732), rector of Buriton, a man of considerable learning, author of A Vindication of the Divine Authority and Inspiration of the Old and New Testaments (1692), Directions for the Profitable Reading of the Holy Scriptures (1708-26), and A Commentary on the Prophets (4 vols., 1714). Robert was educated on the foundation of Winchester College, and in 1730 was elected to a scholarship at New College, Oxford, where he took his degree of M.A. in 1737. In 1741 he was appointed professor of poetry, and it was in this capacity that he delivered the Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, afterwards published in 1753. Bishop Hoadly appointed him in 1744 to the rectory of Ovington, Hampshire, in 1750 to the archdeaconry of Winchester, and in 1753 to the rectory of East Woodhay, also in Hampshire. In 1754 he received the degree of doctor of divinity from his university, and in the following year he went to Ireland along with the duke of Devonshire, then lord-lieutenant, as first chaplain. Soon afterwards he declined a presentation to the see of Limerick, but accepted a prebendal stall at Durham and the rectory of Sedgfield. In 1758 he published his Life of William of Wykeham, which was followed in 1762 by A Short Introduction to English Grammar. In 1765, the year of his election into the Royal Societies of London and Göttingen, he engaged in a hot war of pamphlets with Warburton on a now obsolete question about the relations between the book of Job and the Mosaic economy; and (Gibbon being judge), “whatsoever might be the merits of an insignificant ...controversy, his victory was clearly established by the silent confession of Warburton and his slaves.” In June 1766 Lowth was promoted to the see of St David’s, whence about four months afterwards he was translated to that of Oxford, where he remained till 1777, when he became bishop of London. This last appointment he continued to hold until his death, having declined the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1783. In 1778 appeared his last work, Isaiah, a new Translation, with a Preliminary Dissertation, and Notes, Critical, Philological, and Explanatory. He died at Fulham on November 1787.
The Praelectiones exercised a great influence both in England and on the Continent. Their chief importance lay in the idea of looking at the sacred poetry as poetry, and examining it by the standards applied to profane literature. Lowth’s aesthetic criticism was that of the age, and is now in great part obsolete, a more natural method having been soon after introduced by Herder. The principal point in which Lowth’s influence has been lasting is his doctrine of poetic parallelism, and even here his somewhat mechanical classification of the forms of Hebrew sense-rhythm, as it should rather be called, is open to serious objections. The Praelectiones reached a second edition in 1763, and were republished with notes by J. D. Michaelis in 1770; both text and notes were translated by G. Gregory (1787; 4th ed., 1839). The Oxford edition of the original (1821) contains additions by Rosenmüller, Richter, and Weiss. The editions of Lowth’s Isaia,h have been numerous (13th ed., 1842), but the book is now much less read than the Praelectiones. A volume of Sermons and other Remains, with memoir by Hall, was published in 1834, and there is a comparatively recent edition of the Popular Works of Robert Lowth, 3 vols., 1843.
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