The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810

its way through the impediments which waylay early poverty, and breaking forth like the sun in meridian splendor after a morning of tempest, clouds, and darkness, it will be a fit companion for that of Hodgkinson. As a piece of composition, it is perhaps the very finest specimen to be found in any language of the unaffected, unadorned modest style that becomes a biographer, and particularly a writer of his own life.

This memoir first appeared prefixed to that author's translation of Juvenal.

LIFE OF WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ. AUTHOR OF THE BAEVIAD AND MAEVIAD, AND TRANSLATOR OF JUVENAL.

I 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 following 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 hear