th the county of Buckingham; and that his own remains would
be interred in the vault of the chancel of Bradenham Church, among the
coffins of the descendants of the Hampdens and the Pyes. All which
should teach us that whatever may be our natural bent, there is a power
in the disposal of events greater than human will.

It was about two years after his first acquaintance with Mr. Pye, that
my father, being then in his twenty-fifth year, influenced by the circle
in which he then lived, gave an anonymous volume to the press, the fate
of which he could little have foreseen. The taste for literary history
was then of recent date in England. It was developed by Dr. Johnson and
the Wartons, who were the true founders of that elegant literature in
which France had so richly preceded us. The fashion for literary
anecdote prevailed at the end of the last century. Mr. Pettit Andrews,
assisted by Mr. Pye and Captain Grose, and shortly afterwards, his
friend, Mr. Seward, in his "Anecdotes of Distinguished Persons," had
both of them produced ingenious works, which had experienced public
favour. But these volumes were rather entertaining than substantial, and
their interest in many instances was necessarily fleeting; all which
made Mr. Rogers observe, that the world was far gone in its anecdotage.

While Mr. Andrews and his friend were hunting for personal details in
the recollections of their contemporaries, my father maintained one day,
that the most interesting of miscellanies might be drawn up by a
well-read man from the library in which he lived. It was objected, on
the other hand, that such a work would be a mere compilation, and could
not succeed with its dead matter in interesting the public. To test the
truth of this assertion, my father occupied himself in the preparation
of an octavo volume, the principal materials of which were found in the
diversified collections of the French Ana; but he enriched his subjects
with as much of our own literature as his reading afforded, and he
conveyed the result in that lively and entertaining style which he from
the first commanded. This collection of "Anecdotes, Characters,
Sketches, and Observations; Literary, Critical, and Historical," as the
title-page of the first edition figures, he invested with the happy
baptism of "Curiosities of Literature."

He sought by this publication neither reputation nor a coarser reward,
for he published his work anonymously, and avowedly as a compila