literary autobiography more extraordinary or more elevating than the strength of purpose with which Alfieri, in despite of difficulties apparently insurmountable a neglected education, a dissipated youth, the 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.

No. 14. page 6.

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 mathematic 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.

No. 15. page 6.

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.

No. 16. page 6.

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.

No. 17. page 6.

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 neigh

bouring 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

"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.1 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 sonin-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.

The father of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke married an heiress of this family of Gibbon. The Chancellor's escutcheon 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.