Intimate with, and appreciated by, Sir Robert Walpole, by Henry Pelham, and by other leading statesmen of his day, Mr. Townshend, it is said, but for his diffidence and the amiable sensibility of his nature, might have been selected to fill high office in the state. As it was, the only appointment which he seems to have held, besides his employment in his father's (Lord Townshend's) office, was that of a tellership of the exchequer, to which post he succeeded in the year 1727. In 1739, indeed, he had accepted the situation as chief secretary to William, Duke of Devonshire, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, when the death of a beloved and amiable wife not only so completely prostrated him as to compel him to forego the appointment, but incapacitated him for business. during several subsequent years. This lady, it should be mentioned, was Mary, daughter of Colonel John Selwyn, of Matson, in Gloucestershire, and sister of the celebrated wit, George Selwyn. Not less amiable a person, whose loss, some years afterward, Mr. Townshend had also to deplore, was his third and gallant son, Henry, a lieutenant-colonel in the First Regiment of foot guards, who, apparently not less beloved by the army than he had formerly been beloved as a schoolboy at Eton, was killed, in 1762, at the battle of Wilhelmstadt, in Germany. Nevertheless, Mr. Townshend's old age was happily a contented and cheerful one. "His society, of which he formed the delight and happiness, was," we are told, "composed in general of his particular friends and his family. In their company he enjoyed and exhibited his great and amiable talents till within a very few weeks of his death, which happened just upon the close of his seventy-ninth year, in 1780. CHAPTER IV. THOMAS MORELL, D. D., F. S. A. THIS learned writer and lexicographer was born at Eton on the 18th of March, 1703, and at the age of twelve was entered on the foundation of its famous school. His acquaintance, William Cole, the antiquary, though his junior at Eton by some years, well remembered the time when Morell's mother and sister kept a "dame's," or boardinghouse within the precincts of the college. On the 3d of August, 1722, he was elected to King's College; in 1726 he took his degree as B. A., in 1730 as M. A., and in 1743 became D. D. The first church employment which he enjoyed is said to have been as curate of Kew, on which duty he entered on Lady Day, 1731. He was also for some time curate of Twickenham, at a period when Pope was residing there, and when "Twickenham, where frolic Wharton revelled," had become the most classic village in England. At length, in 1737, on the presentation of King's College, Cambridge, he was instituted to the rec tory of Buckland, the only church living which he ever enjoyed. In 1738 Doctor Morell married Anne, daughter of Henry Barker, Esq., of Chiswick; an event principally of importance as having been the occasion of introducing him to the great painter, Hogarth, by whom he was subsequently consulted in regard to his "Analysis of Beauty," and whom he assisted in its composition. Another illustrious person to whom he afforded literary assistance in his art was Handel, for whose oratorios he adapted the words. Mason, in a letter to Walpole, incidentally, and somewhat contemptuously, speaks of him as "Handel's poet, Doctor Morell." Doctor Morell, besides having been one of the earliest writers in the Gentlemen's Magazine, and the author of several occasional sermons, poems, etc., republished, in 1748, King's edition of four of the tragedies of Euripides, 2 vols. 8vo, the same being followed by an edition of the "Prometheus Vinctus" of Eschylus, 4to; a "Lexicon of Greek Prosody," 4to; an "Abridgment of Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary;" a translation of the "Epistles of Seneca," with notes, 2 vols. 4to, and a modernised edition of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," in which he assisted. He also left notes on Locke's "Essay on the Human Understanding," which had been prepared, it is said, at the instance of Queen Caroline, consort of George II. "As long," writes Nichols, "as learning is cultivated amongst us, the value of his labours will be known, and the public neglect of him while he lived will be lamented." Unhappily, the long life of this eminent scholar was chequered by the depressing consequences of improvidence and debt. Not that he seems to have been the slave of any particular extravagance or vice, but that his want of knowledge of the world, and constant devotion to study, sadly interfered with his proper management of his worldly affairs; while his cheerful, convivial disposition, his taste for the drama, and passion for music and for musical society, though certainly not necessarily involving laxity of morals or conduct, were calculated to prejudice him as a clergyman in the good opinion of those persons in whose hands the dispensation of ecclesiastical preferment was vested. From whatever causes, however, Doctor Morell may have been exposed to the importunities of the dun and to the intrusions of the bailiff, the picture which the story of his life presents, of neglected talent battling with penury, is none the less painful to contemplate. Sad and humiliating, indeed, is the reflection that, toward the decline of his laborious existence, the only patron from whose influence he had to hope for advancement in his sacred profession was a fashionable dancingmaster and violinist. "There mark what ills the scholar's life assail |