was a daughter of the Edgars, who flourished about four hundred
years in the county of Suffolk, and produced an eminent and wealthy
serjeant-at-law, Sir Gregory Edgar, in the reign of Henry the Seventh.
Of the sons of Robert Gibbon, (who died in 1643,) Matthew did not aspire
above the station of a linen-draper in Leadenhall-street; but John
has given to the public some curious memorials of his existence, his
character, and his family. He was born on Nov. 3d, 1629; his education
was liberal, at a grammar-school, and afterwards in Jesus College at
Cambridge; and he celebrates the retired content which he enjoyed at
Allesborough, in Worcestershire, in the house of Thomas Lord Coventry,
where John Gibbon was employed as a domestic tutor, the same office
which Mr. Hobbes exercised in the Devonshire family. But the spirit
of my kinsman soon immerged into more active life: he visited foreign
countries as a soldier and a traveller, acquired the knowledge of the
French and Spanish languages, passed some time in the Isle of Jersey,
crossed the Atlantic, and resided upwards of a twelvemonth (1659) in the
rising colony of Virginia. In this remote province his taste, or rather
passion, for heraldry found a singular gratification at a war-dance of
the native Indians. As they moved in measured steps, brandishing their
tomahawks, his curious eye contemplated their little shields of bark,
and their naked bodies, which were painted with the colours and
symbols of his favourite science. "At which I exceedingly wondered;
and concluded that heraldry was ingrafted _naturally_ into the sense of
human race. If so, it deserves a greater esteem than now-a-days is put
upon it." His return to England after the Restoration was soon followed
by his marriage his settlement in a house in St. Catherine's Cloister,
near the Tower, which devolved to my grandfather and his introduction
into the Heralds' College (in 1671) by the style and title of
Blue-mantle Pursuivant at Arms. In this office he enjoyed near fifty
years the rare felicity of uniting, in the same pursuit, his duty and
inclination: his name is remembered in the College, and many of his
letters are still preserved. Several of the most respectable characters
of the age, Sir William Dugdale, Mr. Ashmole, Dr. John Betts, and Dr.
Nehemiah Grew, were his friends; and in the society of such men, John
Gibbon may be recorded without disgrace as the member of an astrological
club. The study of hereditar