world, designed by Providence to rank with the first named of those four worthies in noble fellowship of effort for the revival of spiritual religion in connection with Protestant dissent. When Watts had attained his twenty-seventh year, Doddridge was born. His birth-place was some unknown house in the labyrinth of London streets, where his father profitably plied the trade of an oilman. The worthy shopkeeper was united to the daughter of a Bohemian clergyman, who had been expelled from his native country as early as 1626, and was for some time master of the Free School at Kingston-upon-Thames. From this union sprang a family of twenty, of whom the boy named Philip was the last. So feeble was the spark of life in the infant child, that he was at first laid aside as dead, and the constitution thus originally delicate in the extreme never attained to robustness. Hence Doddridge's life was one of a thousand proofs how much of mental and spiritual energy may be lodged in a physical frame, frail to a great degree.

His mother was a woman of singular good sense and piety. Like the mother of Alfred, who enticed her boy to the study of letters by

a

exhibiting before him the pictures of an illuminated missal, Mrs. Doddridge encouraged the child of her age in the study of Scripture history, by pointing out, and amplifying, with mother's loving simplicity and graphic power, the scenes of Holy Writ depicted on the blue Dutch tiles, which, according to the fashion of the day, lined the chimney corner. That domestic incident has long been looked on as a sort of poetic legend in Nonconformist biography, as it well may, when one remembers that the little fellow, leaning on his mother's knee, and following the direction of her finger, and listening to her simple, easy words, was the destined author of the "Family Expositor." Nor can we doubt that, as he sat on the hearth-rug by the winter's fire, she would tell of ancestral names and deeds, and how her good father suffered for conscience' sake, and withdrew from Prague by stealth, in the habit of a peasant, with a hundred pieces of gold plaited in his leathern girdle, and a copy of Luther's Bible in his pocket. The son inherited the old book, and kept it as a holy heir-loom. With the girdle a curious story was associated, which the mother, in

some of her pleasant talks at eventide, would love to tell. We think we hear her relating how the refugee, the first night after his escape, left it at an inn on the road, and, discovering the loss, went back in suspense to seek for his treasure; and how the servant had thrown it away amongst some lumber, supposing it of no value, and had forgotten where it was; and then, how, induced by the promise of reward, she searched for it, and found it in a cupboard under the staircase, and restored the girdle, to the owner's no small joy. And we cannot help imagining, as she went on to remark how the sufferer for conscience' sake regarded himself in this event as under the care of a gracious Providence, that thereby were sown the seeds of that love of religious liberty, and that trust in Divine guardianship, which were such powerful elements in Doddridge's character.

On the paternal side, too, there were memorials of worth. His grandfather was John Doddridge, one of the ejected ministers. Speaking of this ancestor, in a letter to a friend, he observes:-" He had a family of ten children unprovided for; but he quitted his

D

living, which was worth to him about two hundred pounds per annum, rather than he would violate his conscience in the manner he must have done, by submitting to the subscriptions and declarations required, and the usages imposed by the Act of Uniformity, contrived by some wicked politicians to serve their own interest, and most effectually humble those who had been most active in that general struggle for public liberty in which the family of the Stuarts had fallen." Calamy, in his beadroll of Bartholomew confessors, marks down this worthy as "an ingenious man, and a scholar, an acceptable preacher, and a very peaceable divine." In addition to which, Orton assures us that he had seen some of his sermons, which were "judicious and serious." In a collateral branch of the same line of ancestry was Sir John Doddridge, one of the judges of the Court of King's Bench in the reign of James I. To his legal attainments he added large stores of general erudition, which are duly celebrated amidst the rich emblazonry of his quaint-looking monument in Exeter Cathedral, where, as Price says, *Shepperton, Middlesex.

in his "Worthies of Devonshire," "he lieth in his scarlet robes, with a court roll in his hand." A scrap from one of his speeches indicates his integrity of purpose, though we grieve to say it was delivered in defence of a judgment supporting the extreme prerogatives claimed by his misguided and unhappy sovereign- "It is no more fit for a judge to decline to give an account of his doings, than for a Christian of his faith. God knoweth I have endeavoured to keep a good conscience, for a troubled one who can bear? I have now sat in this court fifteen years, and I should know something: surely if I had gone in a mill so long, dust would cleave unto my clothes. I am old, and have one foot in the grave; therefore will I look to the better part

as near as I can. moria et in nullo quam humanum."'

But omnia habere in me

erraro divinum potius est The ancestral legends on

the father's side, though less romantic and exciting than those on the mother's, were still of a nature to influence an ingenuous mind like young Philip's, and to spur him on in the pursuit of learning, honour, and religion.