mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other
particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right
understanding of an author. To gratify this curiosity, which is so
natural to a reader, I design this paper and my next as prefatory
discourses to my following writings, and shall give some account in them
of the several persons that are engaged in this work. As the chief
trouble of compiling, digesting, and correcting will fall to my share, I
must do myself the justice to open the work with my own history.

I was born to a small hereditary estate, which, according to the
tradition of the village where it lies, was bounded by the same hedges
and ditches in _William_ the Conqueror's time that it is at
present, and has been delivered down from father to son whole and
entire, without the loss or acquisition of a single field or meadow,
during the space of six hundred years. There runs a story in the family,
that when my mother was gone with child of me about three months, she
dreamt that she was brought to bed of a Judge: Whether this might
proceed from a law-suit which was then depending in the family, or my
father's being a justice of the peace, I cannot determine; for I am not
so vain as to think it presaged any dignity that I should arrive at in
my future life, though that was the interpretation which the
neighbourhood put upon it. The gravity of my behaviour at my very first
appearance in the world, and all the time that I sucked, seemed to
favour my mother's dream: For, as she has often told me, I threw away my
rattle before I was two months old, and would not make use of my coral
until they had taken away the bells from it.

As for the rest of my infancy, there being nothing in it remarkable, I
shall pass it over in silence. I find, that, during my nonage, I had the
reputation of a very sullen youth, but was always a favourite of my