t John
Milton had lived before him, a funny elderly personage called Mr.
Thomas Amory, of whom not nearly so much is recorded as the lovers of
literary anecdote would like to possess. He was sixty-five years
of age; he was an Irish gentleman of means, and he was an ardent
Unitarian. Some unkind people have suggested that he was out of his
mind, and he had, it is certain, many peculiarities. One was, that he
never left his house, or ventured into the streets, save "like a
but, in the dusk of the evening." He was, in short, what is called a
"crank," and he gloried in his eccentricity. He desired that it might
be written on his tombstone, "Here lies an Odd Man." For sixty years
he had made no effort to attract popular attention, but in 1755 he
had published a sort of romance, called _Memoirs of Several Ladies of
Great Britain_, and now he succeeded it by the truly extraordinary
work, the name of which stands at the head of this article. Ten years
later there would appear another volume of _John Buncle_, and then
Amory disappeared again. All we know is, that he died in 1788, at the
very respectable age of ninety-seven. So little is known about him,
so successfully did he hide "like a but" through the dusk of nearly a
century, that we may be glad to eke out the scanty information given
above by a passage of autobiography from the preface of the book
before us:
"I was born in London, and carried an infant to Ireland, where I
learned the Irish language, and became intimately acquainted with its
original inhabitants. I was not only a lover of books from the time
I could spell them to this hour, but read with an extraordinary
pleasure, before I was twenty, the works of several of the Fathers,
and all the old romances; which tinged my ideas with a certain piety
and extravagance that rendered my virtues as well as my imperfections
particularly mine.... The dull, the formal, and the visionary, the
hard-honest man, and the poor-liver, are a people I have had no
connection with; but have always kept company with the polite, the
generous, the lively, the rational, and the brightest freethinkers of
this age. Besides all this, I was in the days of my youth, one of the
most active men in the world at every exercise; and to a degree of
rashness, often venturesome, when there was no necessity for running
any hazards; _in diebus illis_, I have descended headforemost, from a
high cliff into the ocean, to swim, when I could, and ought, to h
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