what has been quoted in every biographical notice of him, that when he was about ten years of age, his father put Pope's translation of "Homer" into his hands, and that he experienced such delight in reading it, that it "fixed him a rhymer for life."
At the age of seventeen, he quitted the paternal roof, and entered as a gentleman-commoner at Magdalen College, Oxford. On his coming of age, he left the University, and just at this time his father died, and the son, only just twenty-one, succeeded to the paternal inheritance. Upon this occasion, he acted in an honourable and generous manner, which redounds greatly to his credit, but which occasioned him much future embarrassment. His father died with debts to the amount of £50,000; none of them, however, chargeable upon the estate. Notwithstanding this, the son defrayed the whole of them: and it was this, combined with losses which he suffered from a fire at his house in Bedfordshire, and the expense of rebuilding his house in Berks, which compelled him to sell his paternal estate. The notice which appeared in the Magazines at the time of his death, contained an error which has ever since been but too faithfully, and pertinaciously repeated, to the effect that he ruined himself by standing a contested election for Berks; whereas, the real causes of his embarrassment were those which we have stated, and it so happens that the contest in 1784 was not very expensive.[1]
The poet immediately after making over the paternal estate, married Miss Hooke, the sister of Lieutenant-Colonel Hooke. Only occasionally visiting London, he was an active and useful county magistrate, was for a great many years in the Berkshire Militia, and the account
- ↑ For a few details of this short Memoir, we are indebted to the courtesy of H. J. Pye, Esq., of Clifton Campville, Tamworth, and R. Dimsdale, Esq., of Essendon Place, Herts.
