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THE EARLY LIFE

OF

SAMUEL ROGERS.

CHAPTER I.

Stoke Newington-Rogers's Ancestors-Dr. Price-Mrs. RogersHer Letters-Her Character.

IN the middle of the eighteenth century the suburban village of Stoke Newington contained a group of friendly households, which embraced many persons afterwards. known in the larger world. The pretty village green, then a piece of open grass with a few ancient elms and quaint Elizabethan houses round it, was a centre of political and religious Liberalism. A meeting-house of the English Presbyterian dissent had been built there in 1708, and there the Rev. Charles Morton, the silenced rector of Blissland, in Cornwall-Defoe's teacher-had kept his school. In the early part of the eighteenth century, Samuel Harris, an East India merchant, who had married a daughter of Queen Mary's physician, Dr. Coxe, lived in one of the houses on the Green; and in 1731 their only daughter, Mary Harris-a cousin of William Coxe, the author of the History of the House of Austria -married Daniel Radford, a warehouseman

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