LXXXVI. From MADAME G. Legislative Assembly. Ge- LXXXVII. To MADAME G. His profession. - - 4.50 the task of writing my life _ an undertaken in Tarkan ny now Diffe (ivers & with may diff" tins pus there with with Irename it ^ MEMOIRS OF SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY. NARRATIVE OF HIS EARLY LIFE WRITTEN BY HIMSELF IN 1796. 1757-1778. August 16. 1796. I SIT down to write my life; the life of one who never achieved any thing memorable, who will probably leave no posterity, and the memory of whom is therefore likely to survive him only till the last of a few remaining and affectionate friends shall have followed him to the grave. A subject so uninteresting will hardly awaken the curiosity of any one into whose hands this writing may chance to fall, and I may almost be assured of having no reader but myself. In truth, it is for myself that I write, for myself alone; for my own instruction, and my own amusement. In old age, if I should live to be old, I may find a pleasure, congenial to that season of life, in retracing the actions and sentiments of my youth and of my manhood, less imperfectly than by the aid of an impaired and decaying memory, and as it were in living again with relations and with friends long deceased. If I had the inclination, I have not the means of speaking of many of my ancestors. The first of them that I have ever heard of is my greatgrandfather; and of him I know little more than that he had a pretty good landed estate at Montpellier, in the south of France, where he resided. He was a Protestant, but living under the religious tyranny of Louis XIV., and in a part of France where persecution raged with the greatest fury, he found it prudent to dissemble his faith, and it was only in the privacy of his own family that he ventured to worship God in the way which he judged would find favour in His sight. His only son, my grandfather, he educated in his own religious principles, and so deeply did the young man imbibe them that, when he was about seventeen years of age*, he made a journey to Geneva for the sole purpose of there receiving the sacrament. It was a journey which had most important consequences to his posterity, and to which I owe that I was not born under the despotism of the French monarchy, and that I have not fallen a victim to the more cruel despotism which succeeded it. At Geneva my grandfather met with the celebrated Saurin, who happened to be on a visit there. The reputation of that extraordinary man was then at the highest. He was revered as an apostle; and his eloquence and his authority could not fail to make a forcible impression on a young mind deeply tinctured with that religious fervour, which persecution generally inspires. The result of a few conversations was a fixed determination in my grandfather to abandon * In 1701: he was born in 1684. |