plunging steed was stopped at
a gate, and being once more subjected to his rider, took him home in
safety. On another occasion, in the same visit of the Editor, he was
tost into the air on the Downs, at the precise moment when an
interesting friend, whom they had just left, being apprehensive of
what would happen, was anxiously viewing him from her window through
a telescope.

These anecdotes may serve to illustrate that _determined_ feature of
his character, which has been already noticed, and which impelled
him, contrary to the advice of his friends, to persevere in a
favourite, though perilous exercise, even at the manifest hazard of
his life. At length, however, they prevailed; and for some years
before he died, he gave up riding on horseback altogether. _Note by
Dr. Johnson_.
[4] My friend Mr. Darley, _MS. addition_.--ED.

* * * * *

SIR WILLIAM JONES.

The life of Sir William Jones has been written by his friend Lord
Teignmouth with that minuteness which the character of so illustrious
and extraordinary a man deserved. He was born in London, on the
twenty-eighth of September, 1746. His father, whose Christian name he
bore, although sprung immediately from a race of yeomen in Anglesea,
could yet, like many a Cambro-Briton beside, have traced his descent, at
least in a maternal line, from the ancient princes of Wales. But what
distinguished him much more was, that he had attained so great a
proficiency in the study of mathematics as to become a teacher of that
branch of science in the English metropolis, under the patronage of Sir
Isaac Newton, and rose to such reputation by his writings, that he
attracted the notice and esteem of the powerful and the learned, and was
admitted to the intimacy of the Earls of Hardwicke, and Macclesfield;
Lord Parker, President of the Royal Society; Halley; Mead; and Samuel
Johnson. By his wife, Mary, the daughter of a cabinet-maker in London,
he had two sons, one of whom died an infant, and a daughter. In three
years after the birth of the remaining son, the father himself died, and
left the two children to the protection of their mother. An
extraordinary mark of her presence of mind, sufficiently indicated how
capable this mother was of executing the difficult duty imposed on her
by his decease. Dr. Mead had pronounced his case, which was a polypus on
the heart, to be a hopeless one; and her