MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR.

Dantex For (for the Dr was prefixed to his name by himself, at a late period
in life) was the son of James Foe, a citizen of London, who carried on the busi-
ness of a butcher, in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate; but having “got a good estate by
merchandise, left off his trade” several years before his death. He was “a
wise and grave man,” sincerely attached to the Presbyterian form of worship;
and when his pastor, the Rev. Samuel Annesley, LL. D., was ejected from
the parish of Cripplegate by the Act of Uniformity, in 1662, he followed him,
and worshipped at the chapel in Bishopsgate for many years.

His son DAnrex was born in 1661, the year following the Restoration; and
after receiving a competent “house education,” and as far as “the free-school
generally goes,” about the age of fourteen he was sent to a dissenting academy
at Newington Green, then superintended by the Rey. Charles Morton, who
was afterwards pastor of a church in Charlestown, Mass., and vice-president of
Harvard College. Here he received as much of a collegiate education as could
be obtained by a dissenter at this period, perfecting his acquaintance with lan-
guages, natural philosophy, logic, geography, and history; and, under the
special direction of his tutor, going through a complete course of theology.
In one of his “ Reviews,” in 1705, he says, ‘I owe this justice to my ancient
father, still living, and in whose behalf I freely testify, that if I am a block-
head, it was nobody’s fault but my own, he having spared nothing in my
education.”

It was the intention of his parents that he should become a Presbyterian
minister, and his education was adapted to that profession. The cause of his
abandoning it has been a matter of some speculation, but the reason may pro-
bably be gathered from the peculiar character of the times. He completed
his academical career in the year when Monmouth had just returned from the
slaughter of the Scottish Covenanters at Bothwell-bridge, and when “it was
not safe for a dissenting minister to be seen in the streets of London,’ the
liberties of England being prostrate before the court and high-church party;
and need we wonder that a person of his ardent temperament should be drawn
aside into the religio-political contests of the times? He himself merely
says, “It was my disaster first to be set apart for, and then to be set apart
from, the honour of that sacred employ.”

At the age of twenty-one, he began that career of authorship which he con-

tinued unremittingly for the s~ace of half a century. His first attempt is a
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