2-16-21 THE Life of this excellent man, and ingenious author, has been written, with equal spirit and candour, by Mrs. Barbauld, a name long dear to elegant literature, and is prefixed to her publication of the Author's Correspondence, published by Philips, in six volumes, in 1804. The leading circumstances of these simple annals are necessarily extracted from that performance, to which the present Editor has no means of adding any thing of consequence. SAMUEL RICHARDSON was born in Derbyshire, in the year 1689. His father was one of many sons, sprung from a family of middling note, which had been so far reduced, that the children were brought up to mechanical trades. His mother was also decently descended, but an orphan, left such in infancy by the death of her father and mother, cut off within half an hour of each other by the great pestilence in 1663. Her name is not mentioned. His father was a joiner, and connected by employment with the unhappy Duke of Monmouth, after whose execution he retired to Shrewsbury, apprehensive, perhaps, of a fate similar to that of College, his brother in trade, and well known in those times by the title of the Protestant Joiner. Having sustained severe losses in trade, the elder Richardson was unable to give his son Samuel more than a very ordinary education; and our author, who was to rise so high in one department of literature, was left unacquainted with any language excepting his own. Under all these disadvantages, and perhaps in some degree owing to their existence, young Richardson very early followed, with a singular bias, the course which was most likely to render his name immortal. We give his own words, for they cannot be amended : "I recollect, that I was early noted for having invention. I was |