well as with the manners and customs of the age in which he wrote, will not be discovered with equal facility. What other times may produce, they must appreciate: but, to adopt the language of an approved scholar,

"Ultimus hic ego sum, sed quam bene, quam male, nolo "Dicere, qui de me judicet, alter erit."

June 5th, 1805.

INTRODUCTION.

I AM about to enter on a very uninteresting sub

ject but all my friends tell me that it is necessary to account for the long delay of the following Work; and I can only do it by adverting to the circumstances of my life. Will this be accepted as an apology?

I know but little of my family, and that little is not very precise: My great-grandfather (the most remote of it, that I ever recollect to have heard mentioned) possessed considerable property at Halsworth, a parish in the neighbourhood of Ashburton; but whether acquired or inherited, I never thought of asking, and do not know.*

He was probably a native of Devonshire, for there he spent the last years of his life; spent them too, in some sort of consideration, for Mr. T. (a very respectable surgeon of Ashburton) loved to repeat to me, when I first grew into notice, that he had frequently hunted with his hounds.

My grandfather was on ill terms with him: I believe, not without sufficient reason, for he was extravagant and dissipated. My father never mentioned his name, but my mother would sometimes tell me that he had ruined the family. That he

* I have, however, some faint notion of hearing my mother say, that he, or his father, had been a China merchant in London. By China merchant, I always understood, and so perhaps did she, a dealer in China-ware: it might be something more.

a

spent much, I know; but I am inclined to think, that his undutiful conduct occasioned my greatgrandfather to bequeath a considerable part of his property from him.

My father, I fear, revenged in some measure the cause of my great-grandfather. He was, as I have heard my mother say, " a very wild young man, who could be kept to nothing." He was sent to the grammar-school at Exeter; from which he made his escape, and entered on board a man of war. He was soon reclaimed from this situation by my grandfather, and left his school a second time, to wander in some vagabond society.* He was now probably given up; for he was, on his return from this notable adventure, reduced to article himself to a plumber and glazier, with whom he luckily staid long enough to learn the business. I suppose his father was now dead, for he became possessed of two small estates, married my mother,+ (the daughter of a carpenter at Ashburton,) and thought himself rich enough to set up for himself; which he did, with some credit, at South Molton. Why he chose to fix there, I never inquired; but I learned from my mother, that after a residence of four or five years, he was again thoughtless enough to engage in a dangerous frolick, which drove him once more to sea: this was an attempt to excite a riot in a Methodist chapel; for which his companions were prosecuted, and he fled, as I have mentioned,

My father was a good seaman, and was soon made second in command in the Lyon, a large armed transport in the service of government: while my

* He had gone with Bamfylde Moore Carew, then an old man. + Her maiden name was Elizabeth Cain. My father's christian name was Edward.

mother (then with child of me) returned to her native place, Ashburton, where I was born, in April, 1756.

The resources of my mother were very scanty. They arose from the rent of three or four small fields, which yet remained unsold. With these, however, she did what she could for me; and as soon as I was old enough to be trusted out of her sight, sent me to a schoolmistress of the name of Parret, from whom I learned in due time to read. I cannot boast much of my acquisitions at this school; they consisted merely of the contents of the "Child's Spelling Book :" but from my mother, who had stored up the literature of a country town, which, about half a century ago, amounted to little more than what was disseminated by itinerant ballad-singers, or rather, readers, I had acquired much curious knowledge of Catskin, and the Golden Bull, and the Bloody Gardener, and many other histories equally instructive and amusing.

My father returned from sea in 1764. He had been at the siege of the Havannah; and though he received more than a hundred pounds for prize money, and his wages were considerable; yet, as he had not acquired any strict habits of economy, he brought home but a trifling sum. The little property yet left was therefore turned into money; a trifle more was got by agreeing to renounce all future pretensions to an estate at Totness;* and with this my father set up a second time as a glazier and house painter. I was now about eight years old, and was put to the freeschool, (kept by

This was a lot of houses, which had been thoughtlessly suffered to fall into decay, and of which the rents had been so long unclaimed, that they could not now be recovered, unless by au expensive litigation.