very extensive, were rewarded by trifling discoveries. Dr. Johnson's Life is well known; but the praise of collecting every particular which industry and zeal could glean belongs to the Rev. Alexander Dyce, the result of whose inquiries may be found in his notes to Johnson's Memoir, prefixed to an edition of Collins's works which he lately edited. Those notices are now, for the first time, wove into a Memoir of Collins; and in leaving it to another to erect a fabric out of the materials which he has collected, instead of being himself the architect, Mr. Dyce has evinced a degree of modesty which those who know him must greatly lament.
William Collins was born at Chichester, on the 25th of December, 1721, and was baptized in the parish church of St. Peter the Great, alias Subdeanery in that city, on the first of the following January. He was the son of William Collins, who was then the Mayor of Chichester, where he exercised the trade of a hatter, and lived in a respectable manner. His mother was Elizabeth, the sister of a Colonel Martin, to whose bounty the poet was deeply indebted.
Being destined for the church, young Collins. was admitted a scholar of Winchester College on the 23rd of February, 1733, where he was educated by Dr. Burton; and in 1740 he stood first on the list of scholars who were to be received at
