pounds for his "Defence of the People." His widow, who, after his
death, retired to Nantwich, in Cheshire, and died about 1729, is
said to have reported that he lost two thousand pounds by entrusting
it to a scrivener; and that, in the general depredation upon the
Church, he had grasped an estate of about sixty pounds a year
belonging to Westminster Abbey, which, like other sharers of the
plunder of rebellion, he was afterwards obliged to return. Two
thousand pounds which he had placed in the Excise Office were also
lost. There is yet no reason to believe that he was ever reduced to
indigence. His wants, being few, were competently supplied. He
sold his library before his death, and left his family fifteen
hundred pounds, on which his widow laid hold, and only gave one
hundred to each of his daughters.

His literature was unquestionably great. He read all the languages
which are considered either as learned or polite: Hebrew, with its
two dialects, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish. In Latin
his skill was such as places him in the first rank of writers and
critics; and he appears to have cultivated Italian with uncommon
diligence. The books in which his daughter, who used to read to
him, represented him as most delighting, after Homer, which he could
almost repeat, were Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and Euripides. His
Euripides is, by Mr. Cradock's kindness, now in my hands: the
margin is sometimes noted; but I have found nothing remarkable.

Of the English poets he set most value upon Spenser, Shakespeare,
and Cowley. Spenser was apparently his favourite; Shakespeare he
may easily be supposed to like, with every other skilful reader; but
I should not have expected that Cowley, whose ideas of excellence
were different from his own, would have had much of his approbation.