long sermons and homilies of Baxter, as I believe, and others of his period; neither by these was I edified, but, on the contrary, so effectually wearied, that by noises and interruptions I seldom failed to render myself obnoxious, and obtain my dismission before the reading was over.

The death of this exemplary lady preceded that of my grandfather by a few years only, and by her he had one son, Richard, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Joanna. Richard was a man of various and considerable accomplishments; he had a fine genius, great wit, and a brilliant imagination; he had also the manners and address of a perfect gentleman, but there was a certain eccentricity, and want of worldly prudence in my uncle's character, that involved him in distresses, and reduced him to situations uncongenial with his feelings, and unpropitious to the cultivation and encouragement of his talents. His connection with Mr. Horace Walpole, the late Lord Orford, had too much of the bitter of dependence in it to be gratifying to the taste of a man of his spirit and sensibility; the one could not be abject, and the other, I suspect, was not by nature very liberal and large minded. They carried on, for a long time, a sickly kind of friendship, which had its hot fits and its cold; was suspended and renewed, but I believe never totally broken and avowedly laid aside. Walpole had by nature a propensity, and by constitution a plea, for being captious and querulential, for he was a martyr to the gout. He wrote prose and published it; he composed verses and circulated them, and was an author, who seemed to play at hide-and-seek with the public. There was a mysterious air of consequence in his private establishment of a domestic printing press, that seemed to augur great things, but performed little. Walpole was already an author with no great claims to excellence, Bentley had those powers in embryo, that would have enabled him to excel, but submitted to be the projector of Gothic establishments for Strawberry Hill, and humble designer of drawings to ornament a thin folio of a meagre collection of odes by Gray, the most costive of poets, edited at the Walpolian press. In one of these designs Bentley has personified himself as a monkey, sitting under a withered tree with his pallet in his hand, while Gray reposes under the shade of a flourishing laurel in all the dignity of learned ease. Such a design with figures so contrasted might flatter Gray, and gratify the trivial taste of Walpole; but, in my poor opinion, it is a satire in copper-plate, and my uncle has most completely libelled both his poet and his patron without intending so to do.

Let this suffice at present for the son of Doctor Bentley; in the course of these memoirs I shall take occasion to recall the

ELIZABETH BENTLEY.

21

attention of my readers to what I have further to relate of him.1 1

Elizabeth Bentley, eldest daughter of her father, first married Humphry Ridge, Esq., and, after his decease, the Rev. Dr. Favell, fellow of Trinity College, and after his marriage with my aunt, Rector of Witton, near Huntingdon, in the gift of Sir John Bernard, of Brampton. She was an honorable and excellent lady; I had cause to love her, and lament her death. She

1 Bentley, the younger, possessed excellent talents, which, however, raised him to no particular eminence. He was the friend of Gray, and, at one time, of Walpole. The Gothic villa of Strawberry Hill owed much of its fame to his taste and designs. He had a natural turn for architecture, but never gave to the art any special study. Walpole, in one of his letters, styles him a true treasure of taste and drawing.' The temper of Walpole was capricious, and his friendship precarious. He quarrelled with Bentley, as with Gray, and 'the good-humored, laughing George Montague.' Cumberland, however, has unjustly disparaged his genius. It is the fashion,' said Byron, 'to underrate Horace Walpole; firstly, because he was a nobleman, and, secondly, because he was a gentleman; but to say nothing of the composition of his incomparable letters, and of The Castle of Otranto,' he is the ultimus Romanorum, the author of the 'Mysterious Mother,' a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling loveplay. He is the father of the first romance, and of the last tragedy in our language, and surely worthy of a higher place than any living author, be he who he may.'-Preface to Marino Faliero."

Such is Byron's estimate of his literary labors; Macaulay thus portrays his character. 'He was,' says the brilliant essayist and historian, unless we have formed a very erroneous judgment of his character, the most eccentric, the most artificial, the most fastidious, the most capricious of men. His mind was a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations. His features were covered by mask within mask. When the outer disguise of obvious affectation was removed, you were still as far as ever from seeing the real man. He played innumerable parts, and overacted them all. When he talked misanthropy, he out-Timoned Timon. When he talked philanthropy, he left Howard at an immeasurable distance. He scoffed at courts, and kept a chronicle of their most trifling scandal; at society, and was blown about by its slightest veerings of opinion; at literary fame, and left fair copies of his private letters, with copious notes to be published after his decease; at rank, and never for a moment forgot that he was an honorable; at the practice of entail, and tasked the ingenuity of conveyancers to tie up his villa in the strictest settlement. The conformation of his mind was such, that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little. Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business. To chat with blue stockings; to write little copies of complimentary verses on little occasions; to superintend a private press; to preserve from natural decay the perishable topics of Ranelagh and White's; to record divorces and bets, Miss Chudleigh's absurdities and George Selwyn's good sayings; to decorate a grotesque house with pie-crust battlements; to procure rare engravings and antique chimney-boards; to match odd gauntlets; to lay out a maze of walks within five acres of ground-these were the grave employments of his long life. From these he turned to politics as an amusement. After the labors of the print-shop and the auction-room, he unbent his mind in the House of Commons. And, having indulged in the recreation of making laws and voting millions, he returned to more important pursuits-to researches after Queen Mary's comb, Wolsey's red hat, the pipe which Van Tromp smoked during his last seafight, and the spur which King William struck into the flank of sorrel.'

inherited the virtues and benignity of her mother, with habits more adapted to the fashions of the world.

Joanna, the younger of Doctor Bentley's daughters, and the Phoebe of Byrom's pastoral, was my mother.' I will not violate the allegiance I have vowed to truth in giving any other character of her than what in conscience I regard as just and faithful. She had a vivacity of fancy and a strength of intellect in which few were her superiors: she read much, remembered well, and discerned acutely: I never knew the person who could better embellish any subject she was upon, or render common incidents more entertaining by the happy art of relating them; her invention was so fertile, her ideas so original, and the points of humor so ingeniously and unexpectedly taken up in the progress of her narrative, that she never failed to accomplish all the purposes which the gayety of her imagination could lay itself out for she had a quick intuition into characters, and a faculty of marking out the ridiculous, when it came within her view, which of force I must confess she made rather too frequent use of. Her social powers were brilliant, but not uniform, for on some occasions she would persist in a determined taciturnity, to the regret of the company present, and at other times would lead off in her best manner, when perhaps none were present who could taste the spirit and amenity of her humor. There hardly passed a day in which she failed to devote a portion of her time to the reading of the Bible; and her comments and expositions might have merited the attention of the wise and learned. Though strictly pious, there was no gloom in her religion, but, on the contrary, such was the happy faculty which she possessed of making every doctrine pleasant, every duty sweet, that what some instructors would have represented as a burden and a yoke, she contrived to recommend as a recreation and delight. All that son can owe to parent, or disciple to his teacher, I owe to her.

My paternal grandfather, Richard, only son of Bishop Cumberland, was rector of Peakirk, in the diocese of Peterborough, and Archdeacon of Northampton. He had two sons and one daughter, who was married to Waring Ashby, Esquire, of Quenby Hall, in the county of Leicester, and died in childbirth of her only son, George Ashby, Esquire, late of Haselbeach, in Northamptonshire. Richard, the eldest son of Archdeacon Cumberland, died unmarried, at the age of twenty-nine, and the younger, Denison, so named from his mother, was my father. He was educated at Westminster School, and from that admitted fellow

1 Dr. Byrom's Pastoral was printed in No. 603 of the 'Spectator.'

commoner of Trinity College, in Cambridge. He married at the age of twenty-two, and though in possession of an independent fortune, was readily prevailed upon by his father-in-law, Doctor Bentley, to take the rectory of Stanwick, in the county of Northampton, given to him by Lord Chancellor King, as soon as he was of age to hold it. From this period, he fixed his constant residence in that retired and tranquil spot, and sedulously devoted himself to the duties of his function. When I contemplate the character of this amiable man, I declare to truth I never yet knew one so happily endowed with those engaging qualities which are formed to attract and fix the love and esteem of mankind. It seemed as if the whole spirit of his grandfather's benevolence had been transfused into his heart, and that he bore as perfect a resemblance of him in goodness, as he did in person: in moral purity he was truly a Christian, in generosity and honor he was perfectly a gentleman.

On the nineteenth day of February, 1732, I was born, in the Master's Lodge of Trinity College, inter silvas Academi, under the roof of my grandfather Bentley, in what is called the Judge's Chamber. Having therefore prefaced my history with these few faint sketches of the great and good men whom I have the honor to number amongst my ancestors, I must solicit the condescension of my readers to a much humbler topic, and proceed to speak professedly of myself.

Here, then, for a while, I pause for self-examination, and to weigh the task I am about to undertake. I look into my heart; I search my understanding; I review my life, my labors, the talents I have been endowed with, and the uses I have put them to, and it shall be my serious study not to be found guilty of any partial estimates, any false appreciations of that self, either as author or man, which of necessity must be made to fill so large a portion of the following pages. When, from the date at which my history now pauses, I look forward through a period of more than seventy and two years, I discover nothing within my horizon of which to be vain-glorious; no sudden heights to turn me giddy, no dazzling gleams of fortune's sunshine to bewilder me; nothing but one long, laborious track, not often strewed with roses, and thorny, cold, and barren, towards the conclusion of it, where weariness wants repose, and age has need of comfort. I see myself unfortunately cast upon a lot in life neither congenial with my character, nor friendly to my peace; combating with dependence, disappointment, and disgusts, of various sorts, transplanted from a college, within whose walls I had devoted myself to studies, which I pursued with ardent passion and a rising reputation, and what to obtain? What, but the

experience of difficulties, and the credit of overcoming them; the useful chastisement which unkindness has inflicted, and the conscious satisfaction of not having merited, nor, in any instance of my life, revenged it?

If I do not know myself I am not fit to be my own biographer; and if I do know myself I am sure I never took delight in egotisms, and now behold! I am self-devoted to deal in little else. Be it so! I will abide the consequences; I will not tell untruths to set myself out for better than I have been, but as I have not been overpaid by my contemporaries, I will not scruple to exact what is due to me from posterity.-Ipse de me scribam. (Cic.)

I have said that I was born on the 19th of February, 1732 ; I was not the eldest child, though the only son, of my mother; my sister Joanna was more than two years older than I, and more than twice two years before me in apprehension, for whilst she profited very rapidly by her mother's teaching, I by no means trod in her steps, but, on the contrary, after a few unpromising efforts, peremptorily gave up the cause, and persisted in a stubborn repugnance to all instruction. My mother's good sense and my grandfather's good advice concurred in the measures to be taken with me in this state of mutiny against all the powers of the alphabet; my book was put before me, my lesson pointed out, and though I never articulated a single word, I conned it over in silence to myself. I have traces of my sensations at this period still in my mind, and perfectly recollect the revolt I received from reading of the Heathen Idols, described in the 115th psalm as having eyes and not seeing, ears, and not hearing, with other contrarieties, which between positive and negative so completely overset my small stock of ideas, that I obstinately stood fast upon the halt, dumb and insensible to instruction as the images in question. Of this circumstance, exactly as I relate it, with those sensations, which it impressed upon my infantine mind, I now retain, as I have already said, distinct recollection.

If there is any moral in this small incident, which can impart a cautionary hint to the teachers of children, my readers will forgive me for treating them with a story of the nursery. I have only to add, that when I at length took to my business, I have my mother's testimony for saying that I repaid her patience.

My family divided their time between Cambridge and Stanwick so long as my grandfather lived, and when I was turned. of six years I was sent to the school at Bury Saint Edmund's, then under the mastership of the Reverend Arthur Kinsman, who formed his scholars upon the system of Westminster, and was a Trinity College man, much esteemed by my grandfather.