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the obligations to my dear and honoured friend and benefactor, which I shall never be able to discharge. To him I owe all my respectability in life, and all my opportunities of public usefulness. Though not a child by birth, I have been one by adoption; and close this Preface by a line borrowed from Homer, which our admired Cowper, with some little variation, inscribed on a bust of his Grecian favourite :

«Ως τε πατήρ ᾧ παιδὶ, καὶ ἐποτε λήσομαι αὐτῷ”

Lov'd as his son, in him I early found,
A father such as I will ne'er forget.

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MEMOIRS

OF THE LATE

REV. CORNELIUS WINTER.

PART I.

HIS OWN ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF.

THE following letters were all sent in the year

one thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine. This is the only date they bear. The Editor deemed it proper to omit a few very minute passages into which the writer had dropped, perhaps from his not suspecting, or his not remembering, that they were to meet the public eye. Some who were unacquainted with the deceased may think that more ought to have been suppressed: but they who knew him will readily and gladly indulge him in a little amplitude and particularity, while relating his own story, to one who would naturally feel interested in the detail of the whole.

LETTER I.

MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,

YOU have taken frequent occasion to testify your disposition to preserve our long established

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friendship. It commenced by the good providence of God; it has hitherto been preserved inviolate; it has been attended with reciprocal advantages; it has given you the claims of a son, and produced in me the tender sensibility of a parent, never offended, but always made happy by a consistent, uniform, and endearing conduct. have no secret that I would wish to conceal from you; there is no instance in which I can oblige you, but I am ready to attend to it. You have requested to see my life extended to this period, drawn out by my own hand; and I have only waited for a fair opportunity to gratify you. Use as you please what I communicate. I am too inconsiderable to attract the attention of the public. Every man is a history to himself. I review my own life with humiliation and self-abhorrence for sins, in my younger years, committed against the Lord; but my humiliation is not limited to that period. I would wish it to be, in part, the closing act of my days. I have obtained mercy, and gratitude is highly due to the God of my life. I have been the subject of his providential goodness; hitherto has the Lord helped me. Select friends, as well as yourself, may be entertained by the recital of the divine conduct, and if any may be excited by it under similar circumstances, either in youth or riper years, to trust in the Lord, I shall esteem the end of its being communicated answered.

I am,

With more affection than words can express,

Ever yours,

CORNELIUS WINTER.

LETTER II.

MY VERY DEAR FRIEND,

In looking to the rock from whence I was hewn, and to the hole of the pit from whence I was digged, I have an effectual antidote against pride; in the mention of them I feel no mortification.

Gray's-inn-lane, in the parish of St. Andrew, Holborn, was the place of my nativity. I was born the ninth and last child of John and Catherine Winter, on the ninth of October, in the year one thousand seven hundred and forty-two, and was baptized on the sixteenth day of the same month, in the parish church.

I am very unacquainted with the history of my family, but from what I have heard of the place of my father's birth, which was in or near Nottingham, and his being educated a Dissenter, I am inclined to conceive my descent is from Dr. Winter, mentioned in Palmer's Non-conformist's Memorial. However, this can be but conjecture, and would be of little consequence could it be ascertained.

I know my mother was a native of Guildford, in Surry. Her immediate descent was humble. She was the second wife of my father. He was by trade a shoe-maker, in very moderate circumstances; he was elected, in the latter part of his life, head porter of Gray's-inu, a situation worth sixty pounds per annum. He died of a consump

tion when I was nine months old. I remember to have heard it remarked, when I was a child, that on his death bed, he much lamented that he had

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