impurity of his native dialect, and even the impetuosity of his own passions, forced his way nevertheless to poetic fame, and created Italian tragedy. Yet we might have wished that his tragedy had more frequently breathed that free and vehement passion which distempered the life of Alfieri, and is expressed with so much truth and careless fidelity in his autobiography.

(14) p. 4.

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston, written by himself, London, 1749. With scientific attainments not unworthy the disciple of Newton, with considerable theological knowledge, with piety which supported him under neglect and poverty, Whiston applied his mathematical knowledge to calculate the time of the comet which was to produce the general conflagration, and the length of its tail. He assailed the established creed on the faith of documents (the Apostolic Constitutions, without a shadow of pretence to authenticity; yet the goodness and sincerity of the man obtained for him, even from those who ridiculed his whimsies, the name of "Honest Will Whiston." A little common sense, and a great deal less vanity, would have made Whiston, instead of the laughing-stock of the brightest age of English wit, an ornament to the science and literature of his country.-M.

(15) page 4.

The life of Dr. Thomas Newton, Lord Bishop of Bristol, is prefixed to his works, and has been republished with those of Pocock, Pearce, and Skelton, 2 vols. 8vo. 1816. Newton, the editor of Milton, the author of a work on the Prophecies, which maintains its popularity, was a decent prelate, of respectable learning, and an elegant taste for the Fine Arts. He kept steadily in view the upward course of preferment, and died Bishop of Bristol and Dean of St. Paul's. His biography is chiefly valuable for the anecdotes which it contains of the great men of his period, particularly of Pulteney, Earl of Bath, his chief patron, and some of the more distinguished churchmen, with whom he was in habits of intimacy. Gibbon (see Life) had particular reasons for hostility towards Bishop Newton.

(16) page 4.

It is impossible to deny the palm in dulness to the Memoirs of Michael de Marolles, a Frenchman of learning, born A. D. 1600. These Mémoires were reprinted in three small volumes in 1755.

(17) page 4.

The biography of Anthony Wood may be found in the first volume of Dr. Bliss's reprint of the Athenæ Oxonienses. It is a very singular picture of the life of an academic and an antiquarian; a chronicle of all small things seen through the microscope of a small mind.

I do not feel myself called upon either to make a selection, or to offer any observations on the literary autobiographies with which the press has teemed since the time of Gibbon.-M.

CHAPTER I.

Account and Anecdotes of the Author's Family.-South Sea Scheme, and the Bill of Pains and Penalties against the Directors; among whom was the Author's Grandfather. -Character of Mr. William Law.

:

My family is originally derived from the county of Kent. The southern district, which borders on Sussex and the sea, was formerly overspread with the great forest Anderida, and even now retains the denomination of the Weald, or Woodland. In this district, and in the hundred and parish of Rolvenden, the Gibbons were possessed of lands in the year one thousand three hundred and twenty-six; and the elder branch of the family, without much increase or diminution of property, still adheres to its native soil. Fourteen years after the first appearance of his name, John Gibbon is recorded as the Marmorarius or architect of King Edward the Third the strong and stately castle of Queensborough, which guarded the entrance of the Medway, was a monument of his skill; and the grant of an hereditary toll on the passage from Sandwich to Stonar, in the Isle of Thanet, is the reward of no vulgar artist. In the visitations of the heralds, the Gibbons are frequently mentioned: they held the rank of Esquire in an age when that title was less promiscuously assumed: one of them, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, was captain of the militia of Kent; and a free school, in the neighbouring town of Benenden, proclaims the charity and opulence of its founder. But time, or their own obscurity, has cast a veil of oblivion over the virtues and vices of my Kentish ancestors; their character or station confined them to the labours and pleasures of a rural life: nor is it in my power to follow the advice of the poet, in an inquiry after a name

"Go! search it there, where to be born, and die,
Of rich and poor makes all the history,"

so recent is the institution of our parish registers. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, a younger branch of the Gibbons of Rolvenden migrated from the country to the city; and from this branch I do not blush to descend. The law requires some abilities; the church imposes some restraints; and before our army and navy, our civil establishments, and India empire, had opened so many paths of fortune, the mercantile profession was more frequently chosen by youths of a liberal race and education, who aspired to create their own independence. Our most respectable families have not disdained the counting-house,

or even the shop; their names are inrolled in the Livery and Companies of London; and in England, as well as in the Italian commonwealths, heralds have been compelled to declare, that gentility is not degraded by the exercise of trade.

The armorial ensigns which, in the times of chivalry, adorned the crest and shield of the soldier, are now become an empty decoration, which every man, who has money to build a carriage, may paint according to his fancy on the panels. My family arms are the same, which were borne by the Gibbons of Kent in an age, when the College of Heralds religiously guarded the distinctions of blood and name: a lion rampant gardant, between three schallop-shells Argent, on a field Azure'. I should not however have been tempted to blazon my coat of arms, were it not connected with a whimsical anecdote.-About the reign of James the First, the three harmless schallop-shells were changed by Edmund Gibbon, Esq. into three Ogresses, or female cannibals, with a design of stigmatizing three ladies, his kinswomen, who had provoked him by an unjust lawsuit. But this singular mode of revenge, for which he obtained the sanction of Sir William Seagar, king at arms, soon expired with its author; and, on his own monument in the Temple church, the monsters vanish, and three schallop-shells resume their proper and hereditary place.

Our alliances by marriage it is not disgraceful to mention. The chief honour of my ancestry is James Fiens, Baron Say and Seale, and Lord High Treasurer of England in the reign of Henry the Sixth; from whom by the Phelips, the Whetnalls, and the Cromers, I am lineally descended in the eleventh degree. His dismission and imprisonment in the Tower were insufficient to appease the popular clamour; and the Treasurer, with his son-in-law Cromer, was beheaded (1450), after a mock trial by the Kentish insurgents. The black list of his offences, as it is exhibited in Shakspeare, displays the ignorance and envy of a plebeian tyrant. Besides the vague reproaches of selling Maine and Normandy to the Dauphin, the Treasurer is specially accused of luxury, for riding on a foot-cloth, and of treason, for speaking French, the language of our enemies: "Thou hast most traiterously corrupted the youth of the realm," says Jack Cade to the unfortunate Lord, "in erecting a grammar-school; and whereas before, our forefathers had no other books than the score and the tally, thou hast caused printing to be used; and, contrary to the king, his crown, and dignity, thou hast

'The father of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke married an heiress of this family of Gibbon. The Chancellor's esutcheon in the Temple Hall quarters the arms of Gibbon, as does also that, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, of Charles Yorke, Chancellor in 1770.-S.

built a paper-mill. It will be proved to thy face, that thou hast men about thee, who usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words, as no christian ear can endure to hear." Our dramatic poet is generally more attentive to character than to history; and I much fear that the art of printing was not introduced into England till several years after Lord Say's death: but of some of these meritorious crimes I should hope to find my ancestor guilty; and a man of letters may be proud of his descent from a patron and martyr of learning.

In the beginning of the last century, Robert Gibbon, Esq. of Rolvenden in Kent 2 (who died in 1618), had a son of the same name of Robert, who settled in London and became a member of the Clothworkers' Company. His wife was a daughter of the Edgars, who flourished about four hundred years in the county of Suffolk, and produced an eminent and wealthy serjeant-atlaw, Sir Gregory Edgar, in the reign of Henry the Seventh. Of the sons of Robert Gibbon (who died in 1643), Matthew did not aspire above the station of a linen-draper in Leadenhall-street; but John has given to the public some curious memorials of his existence, his character, and his family. He was born on the 3d of November, in the year 1629; his education was liberal, at a grammar-school, and afterwards in Jesus College at Cambridge; and he celebrates the retired content which he enjoyed at Allesborough in Worcestershire, in the house of Thomas Lord Coventry, where he was employed as a domestic tutor. But the spirit of my kinsman soon immerged into more active. life; he visited foreign countries as a soldier and a traveller; acquired the knowledge of the French and Spanish languages: passed some time in the Isle of Jersey; crossed the Atlantic, and resided upwards of a twelvemonth (1659) in the rising colony of Virginia. In this remote province his taste, or rather passion, for heraldry found a singular gratification at a war-dance of the native Indians. As they moved in measured steps, brandishing their tomahawks, his curious eye contemplated their little shields of bark, and their naked bodies, which were painted with the colours and symbols of his favourite science. "At which (says he) I exceedingly wondered; and concluded that heraldry was ingrafted naturally into the sense of human race. If so, it deserves a greater esteem than now-a-days is put upon it.” His re

* Robert Gibbon, my lineal ancestor, in the fifth degree, was captain of the Kentish militia, and as he died in the year 1618, it may be presumed that he had appeared in arms at the time of the Spanish invasion. His wife was Margaret Phillips, daughter of Edward Phillips, de la Weld in Tenterden, and of Rose his wife, daughter of George Whitnell, of East Peckham, Esquire. Peckham, the seat of the Whitnells of Kent, is mentioned, not indeed much to its honour, in the Mémoires du Comte de Grammont, a classic work, the delight of every man and woman of taste to whom the French language is familiar.

turn to England after the restoration was soon followed by his marriage-his settlement in a house in St. Catherine's Cloyster, near the Tower, which devolved to my grandfather and his introduction into the Herald's College (in 1671) by the style and title of Bluemantle Pursuivant at Arms. In this office he enjoyed near fifty years the rare felicity of uniting, in the same pursuit, his duty and inclination: his name is remembered in the College, and many of his letters are still preserved. Several of the most respectable characters of the age, Sir William Dugdale, Mr. Ashmole, Dr. John Betts, and Dr. Nehemiah Grew, were his friends; and in the society of such men, John Gibbon may be recorded without disgrace as the member of an astrological club. The study of hereditary honours is favourable to the Royal prerogative; and my kinsman, like most of his family, was a high Tory both in church and state. In the latter end of the reign of Charles the Second, his pen was exercised in the cause of the Duke of York: the Republican faction he most cordially detested; and as each animal is conscious of its proper arms, the herald's revenge was emblazoned on a most diabolical escutcheon. But the triumph of the Whig government checked the preferment of Blue-mantle; and he was even suspended from his office till his tongue could learn to pronounce the oath of abjuration. His life was prolonged to the age of ninety; and in the expectation of the inevitable though uncertain hour, he wishes to preserve the blessings of health, competence, and virtue. In the year 1682 he published at London his Introductio ad Latinam Blasoniam, an original attempt, which Camden had desiderated, to define, in a Roman idiom, the terms and attributes of a Gothic institution. It is not two years since I acquired, in a foreign land, some domestic intelligence of my own family; and this intelligence was conveyed to Switzerland from the heart of Germany. I had formed an acquaintance with Mr. Langer, a lively and ingenious scholar, while he resided at Lausanne as preceptor to the Hereditary Prince of Brunswick. On his return to his proper station of Librarian to the Ducal Library of Wolfenbuttel, he accidentally found among some literary rubbish a small old English voJume of heraldry, inscribed with the name of John Gibbon. From the title only Mr. Langer judged that it might be an acceptable present to his friend; and he judged rightly. His manner is quaint and affected; his order is confused: but he displays some wit, more reading, and still more enthusiasm ; and if an enthusiast be often absurd, he is never languid. An English text is perpetually interspersed with Latin sentences in prose and verse; but in his own poetry he claims an exemption from the laws of prosody. Amidst a profusion of genealogical knowledge,