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. 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 embellishments 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 fi

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

Elizabeth Bentley, eldest daughter of her father, first married Humphry Ridge Esquire, and after his decease the Reverend Doctor-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 honourable and excellent lady; I had cause to love her, and lament her death. She inherited the virtues and benignity of her mother, with habits more adapted to the fashions of the world.

Joanna, the younger of Dr. Bentley's daughters, and the Phoebe of Byron'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 humour so ingeniously and unexpectedly taken up in the progress of her narrative, that she never failed to accomplish all the purposes, which the gaiety of her imagination could lay itself out for: she had a quick intuition into characters, and a faculty of marking out the ridi culous, 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 humour. 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 exposi tions might have merited the attention of the wise and learned. Though strictly pious, there was no gloom in her religion, but on the con trary 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 Archdea> con 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 child-birth 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 fel

low-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 fa ther-in-law Doctor Bentley to take the rec tory 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 mo ral purity he was truly a Christian, in generosity and honour 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 grand-father Bentley, in what is