ors and gentry as have
commissioned him.' He was a friend of Hearne, who frequently mentions
him in his works and _Diary_. Hearne states that Murray told him he
began to collect books at thirteen years of age. Dr. Rawlinson possessed
a painting of him, which was engraved by Vertue. He is leaning on three
books, inscribed 'T. Hearne, V. III., Sessions Papers, and Tryals of
Witches,' and holding a fourth under his coat. Underneath are the
following lines, signed G.N.:--

'Hoh Maister John Murray of Sacomb!
The Works of old Time to collect was his pride,
Till Oblivion dreaded his Care:
Regardless of Friends, intestate he dy'd,
So the Rooks and the Crows were his Heir.'

DR. MEAD, 1673-1754

Dr. Richard Mead, the eminent physician and collector, was born at
Stepney, Middlesex, on the 11th of August 1673. His father, Matthew
Mead, was a divine of some eminence among the dissenters, and during the
Commonwealth was minister of Stepney, but was ejected for nonconformity
in 1662. Richard Mead was first educated at home, and at a private
school kept by Mr. Thomas Singleton, who was at one time second master
at Eton. At the age of sixteen he entered the University of Utrecht,
where he remained three years, and then proceeded to the University of
Leyden for the purpose of qualifying himself for the medical profession.
In 1695 he made a tour in Italy, and after taking the degree of doctor
of philosophy and physic at Padua, he visited Naples and Rome. In 1696
he returned to England, and began to practise at Stepney, in the house
in which he was born. In 1703 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society, and in the same year he was chosen Physician to St. Thomas's
Hospital, and took a house in Crutched Friars, in the City of London,
where he resided until 1711, when he removed to one in Austin Friars,
which had formerly been inhabited by Dr. Howe. In 1707 the University of
Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Medicine, and in the
following year he was admitted a member of the College of Physicians, of
which institution he was elected a Fellow in 1716. On the death of Dr.
Radcliffe in 1714, Mead removed to the residence which had been occupied
by that distinguished physician in Bloomsbury Square, and in 1720 he
took a house in Great Ormond Street, which he filled with books,
pictures and antiquities, and where he lived until his death on the 16th
of January 1754. In 1727 he was appointed Physician-i