shire, a living in the gift of
St. John's College, Cambridge; of which the Doctor had formerly been
fellow and tutor. His mother was Mary, daughter of Anthony Thompson,
Esq. of Trumpington, in the same county. They had no offspring but our
poet, and a daughter born some years before him.

His father was afflicted with a total deafness for so considerable a
portion of his life, as never to have heard the sound of his son's
voice; and was thus rendered incapable of communicating to him that
instruction which he might otherwise have derived from a parent endowed
with remarkable acuteness of understanding. He was, therefore, sent very
early to school at Bury St. Edmunds. Here he continued, under the
tuition of the Rev. Arthur Kinsman, till he was removed to Eton; on the
foundation of which school he was afterwards placed.

His studies having been completed with great credit to himself, under
Doctor George, the head-master of Eton, in the year 1742 he succeeded to
a scholarship of King's College, Cambridge, where his classical
attainments were not neglected. He was admitted in 1745 to a fellowship
of his college; and, in the next year, he took his degree of Bachelor of
Arts. He now resided chiefly in the University, where his resistance to
an innovation, attempted to be introduced into King's College, involved
him in a dispute which occasioned the degree of Master to be refused
him. That College had immemorially asserted for its members an exemption
from the performance of those public exercises demanded of the rest of
the University as a qualification for their degrees. This right was now
questioned; and it was required of the Bachelor Fellows of King's, that
they should compose and pronounce a Latin oration in the public schools.
Such an infringement of privilege was not to be tamely endured. After
some opposition made by Anstey, in common with the other junior Fellows,
the exercise in dispute was at lenth exacted. But Anstey, who was the
senior Bachelor of the year, and to whose lot it therefore fell first to
deliver this obnoxious declamation, contrived to frame it in such a
manner, as to cast a ridicule on the whole proceeding. He was
accordingly interrupted in the recitation of it, and ordered to compose
another; in which, at the same time that he pretended to exculpate
himself from his former offence, he continued in the same vein of
raillery. Though his degree was withheld in consequence of this
pertinacity, yet it