de him extremely sensible to the jibes and
rough treatment of the bigger boys, and the accidental neglect of a
Greek lesson exposed him to a flogging which he never quite forgave. One
of his tutors at Eton was Dr. Roberts, author of Judah Restored, a poem,
in which the numbers of the Paradise Lost are happily imitated. By him,
the young scholar was confirmed in that love of composing verse which he
could trace hack to his ninth year. There is little promise in the
specimens he gives of his earlier attempts. His English ode on the birth
of the present King, inserted in the Cambridge collection, is an
indifferent performance, even for a boy. At the university, he describes
himself to have studied diligently, to have given many of his hours to
drawing and painting, and to have formed friendships which were
dissolved only by death. On Thornton, a member of the same hall, the
most favoured of these associates, whom he lost when a young man, he
wrote an elegy, which is one of the best of his works. With him he
improved himself in the Spanish and Italian languages, the latter of
which they studied under Isola, a teacher at Cambridge, afterwards
creditably known by an edition of the Gerusalemme Liberata. Hayley
entered his name at the Middle Temple on the 13th of June, 1766, and in
the following year quitted Cambridge without a degree. He now made some
ineffectual attempts towards fixing his choice of a profession in life;
but at last poetry, and especially the drama, were suffered to engross
him. In October, 1769, he married Eliza, the daughter of Dr. Ball, Dean
of Chichester. This lady had been the confidant of his attachment to
another. The match was on his part entered on rather from disappointment
than love; and was made contrary to the advice of his surviving parent,
who represented to him the danger there was lest his wife should inherit
an incurable insanity under which her mother long laboured. Many years
after, he put her away, fancying himself no longer able to endure a
waywardness of temper, which, as he thought, amounted nearly to the
calamity that had been apprehended. In the summer of 1774, he retired
with his wife and mother from Great Queen-street, where they had
hitherto resided, to his paternal estate at Eartham in Sussex; but in
the ensuing winter his mother went back to London for medical advice and
there died.

He had endeavoured, but in vain, to bring several of his tragedies on
the stage. Garrick, with s