he entered the lists on the subject of Christ's Kingdom and the authority of the priesthood; and long afterwards, he engaged the great Hoadley in single combat against his plain account of the Sacrament of the Lord's supper. The friend of reason and liberty who struggles, ut cum ratione insaniat is foiled by the high church Champion; and at every weapon of attack and defence the Nonjuror is superior to a Prelate who has been magnified by Whig-Idolatry far above his real size. On the publication of the Fable of the Bees, Mr. Law drew his pen - a sharp pen- against that licentious treatise, and Morality as well as Religion must joyn in his applause. After these praises, which are sincerely bestowed, I have a right to despise his extravagant declamation on the absolute unlawfulness of Stage-entertainments. "The Actors, and Spectators must be all damned: the play-house is the porch of Hell, the place of the Devil's abode where he holds his filthy court of evil Spirits: a play is the Devil's triumph, a sacrifice performed to his glory, as in the Heathen temples of old," etc. etc. etc. Far different in composition and effect is the master-work of Mr. Law, his serious Call to a devout and holy life. His maxims are rigid, but his eloquence is powerful; and if he finds in the reader's breast a spark of devotion, he will soon kindle it to a flame. He points his reasoning and his ridicule against the nominal Christians who forfeit their salvation for the business or pleasures of a transitory world. Some of his portraits of men and manners are not unworthy of the pencil of La Bruyere. His principles are true, either in themselves, or in the opinion of those for whom he writes. Philosophy will teach that all our actions should be conformable to the dignity and happiness of our present Nature; religion may describe the present life as no more than a passage, a preparation to an eternal state of reward or punishment. But the Sage who rejects the truth, and the Saint who obeys the law of the Gospell must equally disdain the absurd contradiction between the faith and practise of the Christian World.

MEMOIR D*

I WAS born at Putney, in the County of Surry, of the marriage of Edward Gibbon, Esq, and his first wife, Judith Porten; and was the eldest of their seven children, all of whom, except myself, died in their infancy. My lot in this World might have been that of a peasant, a slave, or a savage!

My family is ancient and honourable, in the County of Kent, where they were possessed of lands as early as the year 1326, in the parish of Rolvenden. In the beginning of the seventeenth century a younger branch migrated from the Country to the City; nor can I be ashamed of the counter, or even the shop, of my ancestors; since English Gentility has never been degraded by the profession of trade. My grandfather, a man of sense and spirit, was a Commissioner of the Customs in the last Tory Ministry of Queen Anne, and was afterwards chosen one of the Directors of the South sea company. In the calamitous year one thousand seven hundred and twenty, he was stripped of his property, one hundred and six thousand five hundred and forty-three pounds five shillings and sixpence, and reduced, by a most arbitrary vote of the house of Commons, to an allowance of ten thousand pounds. Yet something had been secreted by his foresight, much was restored by his industry; and he died about Christmas, 1736, in the enjoyment, or at least in the possession, of a fortune not inferior to that which he had lost. By his wife, of the ancient family of the Actons of Shropshire, he left one son and two daughters - Hester, who preferred a life of celibacy and devotion, and Catherine, the wife of Edward Elliston, and the mother of the present Lady Eliot,

* Memoir D, from his birth to his father's death. Written 1790-91.

of Port Eliot in the County of Cornwall. My father, who was born in the year 1707, enjoyed the advantages of Academical education and foreign travel; he successively represented in Parliament the borough of Petersfield (1734) and the town of Southampton (1740); and gave a strenuous though silent support to the Tory opposition against Sir Robert Walpole and the Pelhams. Had he trod in the mercantile path of his predecessors, he would have been an happier, and I might be a richer man. But his temper was gay, his life was dissipated; his sisters had been too liberally endowed at his expence; his income was inadequate to his hopes; his expences were superior to his income; and his prudent retreat (1748) to his estate in Hampshire was dignified by pious grief for the loss of a beloved consort.

The weakness and infirmities of my childhood afforded little hope that I should reach the age which I have already attained; and I am indebted for my preservation to the maternal care of my aunt, Mrs. Catherine Porten, at whose name I feel a tear of gratitude trickling down my cheek. During the first years of my life my tender frame was afflicted by almost every disorder to which human nature is exposed; and every practitioner, from Sloane and Mead to Ward and the Chevalier Taylor, was successively summoned to torture or relieve me. From these ills and their remedies I have wonderfully escaped, and though I have never known the insolence of active and vigorous health, I have seldom required, since the age of fifteen, the serious advice of a Physician. But the care of my body had already been pernicious to that of my mind, and the progress of my education was often relaxed by indulgence and often interrupted by disease.

In my seventh year I imbibed the rudiments of science from the domestic tuition of Mr. John Kirkby, a Nonjuring Clergyman, the author of an English Grammar, which he dedicated to my father, and of a moral romance, entitled the life of Automathes (1745). In my eighth year I was dismissed from the tenderness and luxury of my own family to

the discipline and tumult of a school, from whence, however, I was often recalled to a bed of sickness. At Kingston, and afterwards in the more public seminary of Westminster, I acquired, with much sweat and some blood, a competent knowledge of the Latin tongue; but my frequent absence and early departure would not allow me to reap the full harvest of a Classical institution and the society of my equals. During the last two years which preceded my settlement at Oxford (1750-1752), I was moved from place to place for the benefit of the waters or of medical assistance, and, except some rare occasional lessons, the child was abandoned to his own pursuits. From the dawn of reason I had discovered a taste, or rather a passion, for books; my infirmities disqualified me for the rough play of the school, and while I was confined to the chamber or the couch, reading - free desultory reading was the solace of my leisure hours. My young fancy was first captivated by works of fiction, the Arabian nights, and Pope's Homer; but I soon fixed on my proper food: all the volumes of history, Chronology, and Geography which I could procure in English were eagerly devoured; and though I read without choice or judgement, the ancient and modern World were gradually opened to my view. Several projects of composition already floated in my mind, and I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a Doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a schoolboy would have been ashamed.

Before I had accomplished my fifteenth year I was matriculated as a Gentleman-Commoner of Magdalen College, in the ancient and famous university of Oxford, in which I consumed fourteen months, the most barren and unprofitable of my whole life. After every fair abatement for my tender age, unripe studies, and hasty removal, the reader will impute this loss of time either to my own incapacity or to the misconduct of my Academical guides. Yet I will take leave to repeat, after a philosopher and a friend, that "in the university of Oxford the greater part of the public professors, for these

many years past, have given up, altogether, even the pretence of teaching" (Riches of Nations, vol. ii. p. 343). The monks or fellows of our wealthy foundation were immersed in Port wine and Tory politics; no model, or motive, or example of study was proposed to the under-graduates, and the silk gown, the velvet cap, was a badge of protection against the formal exercises of the common hall. The diligence of my College Tutors was confined to a morning lecture of an hour, which I was at full liberty to attend or forget: with the first, one of the best of the tribe, I read in two or three months two or three plays of Terence; but I was never called, in a much longer space, to visit the chambers of the second. The idleness of a boy was easily betrayed into some irregularities of company and expence; but after my foolish, frequent excursions to London, Bath, etc., I never felt the hand of authority, or ever heard the voice of admonition - I shall rejoyce to learn that, since my time, any reformation has taken place either in the university or in the college.

As the university of Oxford had contrived to unite the opposite extremes of bigotry in her doctrines and of indifference in her practise, the religion of her pupils was not less neglected than their litterature; and I was left, by the dim light of my Catechism, to grope my way to the Chappel and the Communion-table. But the dull weight of the Atmosphere had not totally broken the elasticity of my mind. Accident threw into my hands, and curiosity tempted me to peruse, some Popish treatises of Controversy. I read till I was deluded by the specious sophistry, till I believed that I believed all the tremendous mysteries of the Catholic creed; and my folly may be excused by the examples of Chillingworth and Bayle, whose acute understandings were seduced at a riper age by the same arguments. With the ardour of a youth and the zeal of a proselyte, I was impatient to enter into the pale of the Church; some acquaintance in London introduced me to a priest, and at his feet I solemnly abjured the heresy of my ancestors. My father was neither a bigot