LIFE OF WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ. AUTHOR OF THE BAEVIAD AND MAEVIAD, AND
TRANSLATOR OF JUVENAL.

I am about to enter on a very uninteresting subject; but all my friends
tell me that it is necessary to account for the long delay of the
following work; and I can only do it by adverting to the circumstances
of my life. Will this be accepted as an apology?

I know but little of my family, and that little is not very precise. My
great-grandfather (the most remote of it, that I ever recollect to have
heard mentioned) possessed considerable property at Halsworthy, a parish
in the neighbourhood of Ashburton; but whether acquired or inherited, I
never thought of asking, and do not know.

He was probably a native of Devonshire, for there he spent the last
years of his life; spent them too, in some sort of consideration, for
Mr. T. a very respectable surgeon of Ashburton, loved to repeat to me,
when I first grew into notice, that he had frequently hunted with his
hounds.

My grandfather was on ill terms with him: I believe not without
sufficient reason, for he was extravagant and dissipated. My father
never mentioned his name, but my mother would sometimes tell me that he
had ruined the family. That he spent much I know; but I am inclined to
think that his undutiful conduct occasioned my great-grandfather to
bequeath a part of his property from him.

My father, I fear, revenged in some measure the cause of my
great-grandfather. He was, as I have heard my mother say, "a very wild
young man, who could be kept to nothing." He was sent to the
grammar-school at Exeter; from which he made his escape, and entered on
board a man of war. He was soon reclaimed from this situation by my
grandfather, and left his school, a second time, to wander in some
vagabond society.[A] He was now probably given up, for he was, on his
return from this notable adventure, reduced to article himself to a
plumber and glazier, with whom he luckily staid long enough to learn the
business. I suppose his father was now dead, for he became possessed of
two small estates, married my mother,[B] the daughter of a carpenter at
Ashburton, and thought himself rich enough to set up for himself; which
he did with some credit, at South Molton. Why he chose to fix there, I
never inquired; but I learned from my mother, that after a residence of
four or five years he was again thoughtless enough to engage in a
dangerous frolic, which drove him once more to sea. This was