Richard Watson".

Got

BISHOP OF LLANDAFF, ARCHDEACON OF ELY, F.R.S., &c.

1736-1816.

Love and meekness, Lord,

Become a Churchman, better than ambition.

SHAKSPEARE.

W

"that

E often hear it said of a man of parts, he would have been conspicuous in any thing" he had undertaken; and the frequency of the fact makes the expression intelligible. Æsop was distinguished as a slave, and Shakspeare was not the least amongst poachers, as well as amongst poets; and had the lot of Newton, or of Napoleon, been cast amongst hewers of wood and drawers of water, they would have overtopped their fellows. Byron and Coleridge are not exceptions, although the one never reached mediocrity in the House of

There is a fine portrait of him by Romney; an engraving of it forms the frontispiece of his Anecdotes.

Peers, nor the other could ever get out of the awkward squad of his regiment; and simply because neither would have elicited, nor deserved the compliment. The remark, however, might have been honestly made of the subject of the present memoir; for in illo viro (as Livy says of Cato Major) tantum robur corporis et animi fuit, ut quocunque loco natus esset, fortunam sibi facturus videretur.

But as John Locke (whose disciple in politics he always plumed himself on being) says, there is scarce any one without some idiosyncracy that he suffers by; so, indeed, had our fellow-countryman his, which he suffered by, and will seriously suffer from in the judgment of Time. There is one word in the English language, in which all that was mortal of him might be expressed, but which, at present (for in dispensing justice, the forms of trial cannot be dispensed with) we forbear to use. The curious, however, may like to know that the epithet alluded to was the casus belli between Mr. Alderman Blotten and Samuel Pickwick Esquire, and is found recorded in the first of the Posthumous Papers of the immortal Pickwick Club, to which these worthies in a Pickwickian sense belonged.

Dr. Johnson seems to have thought that to be the best memoir or life of a man which was written by the man himself. Whether he, with all his gigantic powers of pen and penetration, could have done what Boswell has done for him, or whether the opinion is conformable to general experience,

we need not now stay to inquire; seeing that Watson has written his own under the popular title of Anecdotes, and that no Boswell has entered the lists to contest the prize with him. The merits of the book itself we leave for review to a more seasonable moment. Suffice it now to observe, that it admits posterity behind the scenes on many interesting subjects, especially as to his own motives, and those of his order, on the most important concerns of the day; and which must have passed away as a shadow, or been left to deduction, if not so industriously recorded by his own hand: it also raises us, as to himself, to that height whence we ought to survey so vast a subject—to the vantageground of truth; whence we may see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below; whence we may track him through the windings of his varied life; watch his progress from youth to manhood; from Heversham school to the See of Llandaff; explore the mysteries of his fortune; detect the sources of his power; and the disturbing influences of his being. In a few words, whence we may survey the parts he sustained in the great drama of civil and religious liberty; tragedy rather let us call it, in the age in which he lived, wherein the destruction of the Altar and the Throne was the plot, the strongest men Europe ever saw were the actors, with the civilized world for their audience.

The anecdotes narrated of his swaddling days are

as extravagant, and as numerous, as any told of remarkable men. But such nursery tales are beneath the dignity of Biographical record; and although they might amuse some children of larger growth, as they could improve and instruct none, we shall not condescend to repeat them.

He begins the narrative of his own life thus; "I was born at Heversham, in Westmorland, in August 1737." This is one of the many inaccuracies in which the book abounds. The following is the register of his baptism from the church books, "Richard, son of Mr. Thomas Watson of Heversham, September 25, 1736." His mother's maiden name was Newton. He had a brother and sister both older than himself. The brother was afterwards a curate at Kendal, and died at an early age.

For the place of his birth he ever retained a strong partiality; and his marriage into the ancient family of Wilson of Dallam Tower, while it flattered his vanity, added vastly to that love of fatherland, which nature has planted in the bosom of every one, and preeminently so, or they are much belied by the world, in the stalwart sons of Coniston, and Skiddaw, of Stainmore and Helvellyn.

Watson was educated at the village school of Heversham. This school had been, for many years, under the rod of his father the Reverend Thomas Watson, with no less credit to himself than to the benefit of the grey-coats around him; many of whom, with an astuteness beyond their kind, took

the happy tide that led on to fortune, and lived to see their sons, educated by him, deserving and honoured dignitaries in Church and State. He was master of this school from 1688 to 1737; and therefore the son is again in error when he says that his father had resigned before he was born. There is a monument to him in Heversham Church, with the following

Whether, in truth, Mr. Watson found the school in that high condition in which he left it to his successor*, after near fifty years' superintendence, our present information leads us to no safe conclusion: if a conjecture might be hazarded, that would be, that he found it a cold statue and embraced it into life. Certain it is, that its habit and repute were good, and stretched far beyond the Vale of Levens, when the rod of power fell from his hands.

It is a remarkable feature in the history of the

The Revd. Thomas Nicholson.