BIOGRAPHY.
For those readers who love biography, the editors of The Mirror have selected one of the most interesting memoirs to be found in the rich treasury of British literature. As a simple, yet animated picture of natural genius, forcing its way through the impediments which waylay early poverty, and breaking forth like the sun in meridian splendor after a morning of tempest, clouds, and darkness, it will be a fit companion for that of Hodgkinson. As a piece of composition, it is perhaps the very finest specimen to be found in any language of the unaffected, unadorned modest style that becomes a biographer, and particularly a writer of his own life.
This memoir first appeared prefixed to that author's translation of Juvenal.
LIFE OF WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ. AUTHOR OF THE BAEVIAD AND MAEVIAD, AND TRANSLATOR OF JUVENAL.
I am about to enter on a very uninteresting subject; 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 Halsworthy, 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 spent much I know; but I am inclined to think that his undutiful conduct occasioned my great-grandfather to bequeath a 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.[A] 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,[B] 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 frolic, 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.