in Cheapside. Daniel Radford had come to London from Chester with a capital of a thousand pounds, with which he had entered into partnership with Mr. Obadiah Wickes. He was the son of Samuel Radford, a linendraper at Chester, and of Eleanor his wife, third daughter of the Rev. Philip Henry, one of the most eminent of the clergy who had been ejected on the passing of the Act of Uniformity in 1662. Philip Henry was the son of one of the pages of Charles I. He was born in the palace at Whitehall, had been a playfellow of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, had seen the king beheaded, and was in politics a Cavalier. His mother inclined to the teaching of the Presbyterian divines, and the son, after leaving Westminster School, and taking his degree at Oxford, had adhered to the same side in religious matters, and had entered the Church during the Protectorate by Presbyterian ordination. Daniel Radford, his grandson, inherited the serious disposition and the religious principles of his grandfather. Daniel's father and mother, the Chester linendraper and his wife, had died early, and Daniel was brought up by his maternal uncle, the Rev. Matthew Henry, the author of the celebrated Commentary on the Bible. Daniel Radford's Diary shows the influence of this ancestry and training. He was an introspective person, and religious feeling tinged his life. He puts on record, sometimes day by day, sometimes only year by year, not the day's events nor the year's history, but the serious reflections which the flight of time or the death of friends, or family joys and troubles, suggested to a religious mind. A few events of personal and family

HIS MATERNAL GRANDFATHER

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interest are noted here and there, but only for the sake of recording some pious resolution or of writing down some aspiration which had arisen out of them. The Journal begins in March, 1715, with an extract from a devotional book, and ends in June, 1767, less than four months before his death, with the expression of the hope that though I shall not die a profitable servant, yet I hope to die a pardoned sinner through Jesus Christ.' In all the two-and-fifty years there is only one reference to a public event, and that is an earthquake,' which suggested a religious reflection to his mind.

Daniel Radford was born on the 24th of May, 1691, and died on the 14th of October, 1767, having completed his seventy-sixth year on the 4th of June, to which the change of style had transferred his birthday. He had settled at Newington Green on his marriage in 1731, had lived there all the rest of his life, and there his only child Mary had been born. With Philip Henry for his grandfather, and Matthew Henry the commentator for his uncle, it was natural that Daniel Radford should connect himself with the small Presbyterian congregation at the

This entry in the Diary is as follows: In London, on Thursday, 8th February, 1749, betwixt twelve and one o'clock at noon, we were surprised greatly by the shock of an earthquake which was felt in the city and the country round about it. I happened to be shaving then in the counting-house, and I asked the barber what the noise and shaking was. He said he believed somebody had fallen down above-stairs, for indeed it felt as if something heavy was fallen down. I thought it felt as if the house had given way, and so most people indeed did, that were in houses. But, thanks be to God! it did very little damage anywhere as I heard of, and it was over almost as soon as one felt it. And, alas! too much so has been the remembrance of the thing itself among us. But shall I not fear always before, and stand in awe of, this great and holy Lord God, who can, whenever He pleases, make the earth shake, with the foundations thereof ?'

chapel on the Green. The minister was Mr. Hoyle; but a man destined to European renown, and worthy of it, was living near, and gave occasional help. This was Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Richard Price, who became preacher to the congregation in 1758. Daniel Radford and his daughter his wife had died in 1738, when Mary was scarcely three years old-were thus brought into contact. with one of the most acute and enlightened minds the eighteenth century produced, with the best intellectual and social results to their connections and descendants.. Daniel Radford was treasurer to the congregation, and at his death left a hundred pounds towards the augmentation of the salary of the minister.

The little group of people among whom the Radfords lived, was Puritan by ancestry and association, in full sympathy with the Whig party in politics, and inclined to latitudinarian opinions on theological questions. In the sixth decade of the century there came into it a young man of altogether different birth and training. In Daniel Radford's Diary there is the record of the deaths of his two partners: Mr. Obadiah Wickes, the father, in 1748, and Mr. John Wickes, the son, in 1750. On the 1st of January, 1753, he writes that he is again in some concern about a new co-partnership into which he has entered with Mr. Rogers. This was Thomas Rogers, a glass manufacturer of Stourbridge, whose only son afterwards removed to London to take part in the business in which his father had thus become a partner. Thomas Rogers lived at a house called The Hill' in the parish of Old Swinford, and his name had been long associated with the manufacturing industry of Stour

HIS PATERNAL ANCESTORS

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bridge. The earliest record of the family is that the will of Thomas Rogers the elder, of Amblesant, yeoman, was proved on the 27th of June, 1681, by Anne, his widow and sole executrix. This Thomas Rogers is described as a Welshman, and an eminent dealer in glass, in Holloway End, Stourbridge, He had married the daughter of M. Tyttery of Nantes, in Lorraine, and left two sons, Thomas and James, and a daughter, Sarah. This second Thomas Rogers had a half share in the business, and was apparently the father of Thomas Rogers of The Hill,' the partner of Daniel Radford. Thomas Rogers of The Hill' the grandson of the Welshman who had married the Frenchwoman, and the grandfather of Samuel Rogers-was a person of much influence and consideration in the town and county. He had married a daughter of Richard Knight of Downton; and Richard Payne Knight, the antiquary, and Thomas Andrew Knight, the writer on horticulture, were his nephews. He was a Tory of the old school, and lived on excellent terms with the Tory gentry of the county. In the picturesque and well-kept churchyard of Old Swinford there are still memorials of the Rogers family; and

Yon old mansion frowning through the trees,

of which Samuel Rogers speaks in The Pleasures of Memory,' was, in all probability, the house of Thomas Rogers, his grandfather, which was not far from the church. A few miles off was The Leasowes,' where Shenstone lived, and where he died in the year in which Samuel Rogers was born. Close at hand, at Hagley, was George Lyttelton, the friend of Pope, the patron of

Thomson, the poet of Blenheim' and 'The Progress of Love'; afterwards, author of 'Dialogues of the Dead,' a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer and a peer. Farther off, on the other side of Stourbridge, dwelt the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, at Enville; and round about were the houses of many other country gentlemen with most of whom hatred of the Whigs was the chief public passion and virtue. Such was the circle in which, in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the elder Thomas Rogers lived and Thomas Rogers the younger was brought up.

There is no record of the date at which Thomas. Rogers the younger removed to London. He was probably just about of age when he left the Tory atmosphere of the country house in Worcestershire, and plunged into the entirely different moral and social conditions and influences of Stoke Newington. It is evident that he soon won the esteem of his father's partner, for in 1760 he was married to Daniel Radford's only daughter, Mary. The wedding took place at Islington parish church on the 27th of March, 1760; and on the next New Year's Day Thomas Rogers joined his father and father-in-law in the partnership, the latter advancing him 2,000l. to make up his share of the stock-in-trade. Thomas Rogers yielded quickly and fully to the new influences around him. As soon as we get any glimpse of his opinions we find him to be in full sympathy with the political and religious Liberalism of his wife's family and friends. He was a good man of business, and prospered in his way. In 1765 he joined George and Thomas Welch, who were bankers in Cornhill, and the firm there