dean of the chapel royal and privy councillor. In 1783 he was offered the chance to become Archbishop of Canterbury, but declined due to failing health. Lowth was good friends with the Scottish Enlightenment figure David Hume, as noted by the prominent Scottish bookseller Andrew Millar. Millar commented that "Hume and he are very great, tho' one orthodox and ye other Hedretox". Lowth wrote a Latin epitaph, Cara, Vale ("Dear one, farewell!") on the death of his daughter Maria. Much admired in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was set to music by the English composer John Wall Callcott. Lowth died in 1787, and was buried in the churchyard of All Saints Church, Fulham. Old Testament scholarship Lowth seems to have been the first modern Bible scholar to notice or draw attention to the poetic structure of the Psalms and much of the prophetic literature of the Old Testament. In Lecture 19 he sets out the classic statement of parallelism, which remains the most fundamental category for understanding Hebrew poetry. He identifies three forms of parallelism, the synonymous, antithetic and synthetic (i.e., balance only in the manner of expression without either synonymy or antithesis). This idea has been influential in Old Testament Studies to the present day. Work on English grammar Lowth is also remembered for his publication in 1762 of A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Prompted by the absence of simple and pedagogical grammar textbooks in his day, Lowth set out to remedy the situation. Lowth's grammar is the source of many of the prescriptive shibboleths that are studied in schools, and established him as the first of a long line of usage commentators who judge the English language in addition to describing it. An example of both is one of his footnotes: "Whose is by some authors made the possessive case of which, and applied to things as well as persons; I think, improperly." His most famous contribution to the study of grammar may have been his tentative suggestion that sentences ending with a preposition—such as "what did you ask for?"—are inappropriate in formal writing. (This is known as preposition stranding.) In what may have been intentional self-reference, Lowth used that very construction in discussing it. "This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing