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The satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1806)
The satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis - 1806 Author:Juvenal Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. JL Am about to enter on a very uninteresting subject: but all my friends tell me that it is necessary to account for the long delay of the folHw... more »ing Work ; and I can only do it by adverting to the circumstances of my life. Will this be accepted as an apology ? I know but little of my family, and that little is not very precise : My great-grandfather (the most remote of it, that I ever recollect to have heard mentioned) possessed considerable property at Halsworth, a parish in the neighbourhood of Ash- burton ; but whether acquired or inherited, I never thought of asking, and do not know. He was probably a native of Devonshire, for there he spent the last years of his life ; spent them, too, in some sort of consideration, for Mr- T. (a very respectable surgeon of Ashburton) loved to repeat to me, when I first grew into notice, that he had frequently hunted with his hounds. My grandfather was on ill terms-with him: I believe, not without sufficient reason, for he was extravagant and dissipated. My father never mentioned his name, but my mother would sometimes tell me that he had ruined the family. That he I have, however, some faint notion of hearing my mother say, that he, or his father, had been a China merchant in London. By China merchant, I always understood, and so perhaps did she, a dealer in China-ware : it might be something more. spent much, I know; but I am inclined to think, that his undutiful conduct occasioned my greatgrandfather to bequeath a considerable part of his property from him. My father, I fear, revenged in some measure the cause of my great-grandfather. He wasi as I have heard my mother say, " a very wild young man, who could be kept to nothing." He was sent to the grammar-school at Exeter ; from which hi made his escape, a...« less