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critical cant and affected sanctity of the Oliverians. Her whole life was modelled on the purest principles of piety, benevolence and christian charity; and in her dying moments, my mother being present and voucher of the fact, she breathed out her soul in a kind of beatific vision, exclaiming in rapture as she expired-It is all bright, it is all glorious!

I was frequently called upon by her to repeat certain scriptural texts and passages, which she had taught me, and for which I seldom failed to be rewarded, but by which I was also frequently most completely puzzled and bewildered; so that I much doubt if the good effects of this practice upon immature and infantine understandings will be found to keep pace with the good intentions of those who adopt it. One of these holy apothegms, viz. -The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good, I remember to have cost me many a struggle to interpret, and the result of my construction was directly opposite to the spirit and meaning of the text.I was also occasionally summoned to attend upon the readings of 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

sion before the reading was over.

my dismis

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 connexion with Mr. Horace Walpole, the late Lord Orford, had too much of the bitter of dependance 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 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 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 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 daugh ters, 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

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