when dying confessed herself to have been the murderess. Of retiring habits, simple yet refined tastes and courteous manners, my father was essentially a gentleman and while he had an utter contempt of such as Mr Thackeray termed 'stuck-up people, he instinctively conceded to every rank of life its due proprieties. His society was courted for the attractiveness of his conversation, in which few excelled, and he numbered among his friends many eminent in art, sciences and the learned professions as well as in literature. A short biography of Hone's life written by his friend and sometime neighbour, Frances Rolleston, was published five years after his death, a revised edition six years later, under the title Some Account of the Conversion from Atheism to Christianity of the Late William Hone. The medieval scholar M. R. James sharply criticized Hone's The apocryphal New Testament as "to speak frankly, a very bad book" on a number of grounds: it republished the 1700s translations of Archbishop Wake and Jeremiah Jones without crediting them; it misleadingly presented apocrypha as if a supplement to the New Testament; it combined non-apocryphal works of the early Church Fathers with anonymous apocryphal works without any clarification or distinction; and so on. James did admit that Hone's book was his first exposure to such works and kindled a fondness for it in spite of its flaws, and published his own collection of New Testament apocrypha in 1924 in the hopes of replacing Hone's version. The Australian Brian Hone is a descendant of William's via his son Alfred Hone, a sculptor. The Hone's youngest daughter Alice was married to the French furniture designer Henri Auguste Fourdinois, the son of . In popular culture The 2018 play Trial by Laughter by Ian Hislop and Nick Newman covers the three trials of Hone in 1817. Notes References Wilson, Ben. The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and the Fight for the Free Press. Faber and Faber, 2005. 356 pages. The Descendants of William Hone by William's descendant, Tracey Hawkins (http://thedescendantsofwilliamhone.blogspot.com/) 2018 Hackwood, Frederick. "William Hone. His Life and Times". Originally published 1912 in London (US edition published by Burt Franklin NYC) The William Hone Biotext website by Associate Professor Kyle Grimes (http://honearchive.org/) 2008 External links William Hone, the BioText - contains biographical information and source documents. Retrieved 12 October 2011. Hone Manuscript Collection - includes a biography and is a source of primary