Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 21.djvu/256

  pictures, although he did not engrave many. They include a half-length portrait of Queen Victoria, after William Fowler, engraved in 1840, and a head of his master, Edward Scriven, after Andrew Morton, engraved for Pye's ‘Patronage of British Art,’ 1845. His death, occasioned by an attack of English cholera, took place at his residence in Albany Street, Regent's Park, London, on 28 July 1851, in his forty-ninth year. He died unmarried, and left scarcely half finished a plate from Webster's picture of ‘The Boy with many Friends,’ which was completed by P. Lightfoot.



GIBBON, CHARLES (fl. 1589–1604), miscellaneous writer, was a member of Cambridge University, but there is no record of his having graduated. He was probably in holy orders, and appears to have resided at Bury St. Edmunds, London, and King's Lynn. He was the author of:
 * 1) ‘The Remedie of Reason: not so comfortable for matter as compendious for memorie,’ 1589, 4to.
 * 2) ‘A compendious Forme for domesticall Duties; also our Trust against Trouble,’ 1589, 4to.
 * 3) ‘Not so newe as true, being a caueat for all Christians to consider of. Wherein is truelie described the iniquities of this present time, by occasion of our confused living, And justly approved the world to be never worse by reason of our contagious lewdness,’ 1590, 4to.
 * 4) ‘A Work worth the Reading, wherein is contained fiue profitable and pithy questions, very expedient as well for parents to perceive howe to bestowe their children in mariage, & to dispose their goods at their death, as for all other Persons to receive great Profit by the rest of the matters herein expressed,’ 1591, 4to.
 * 5) ‘The Praise of a Good Name; the Reproach of an Ill Name, … with certain pithy Apothegues very profitable for this age,’ 1594, 4to. This book, which is dedicated to ‘some of the best and most ciuill sort of the inhabitants of St. Edmond's Bury,’ appears to have been written in answer to some calumny under which the author was smarting.
 * 6) ‘The Order of Equalitie, contriued and divulged as a generall Directorie for common Sessements; serving for the indifferent defraying, taxing, & rating of common Impositions and Charges, lyable to Citties, Townes, or Villages,’ &c., Cambridge, 1604, 4to. The last-named work, which is perhaps the most important, is an appeal for proportional equalisation of the incidence of taxation.



GIBBON, EDWARD (1737–1794), historian, was the descendant of a family settled at Rolvenden in Kent since the fourteenth century (an article in the Gent. Mag. 1788, p. 698, by Sir Egerton Brydges, gives an account of the ancestry differing from that in Gibbon's autobiography). A Matthew Gibbon (baptised 23 Feb. 1642) became a linendraper in Leadenhall Street. Matthew had two sons, Thomas, who became dean of Carlisle, and Edward (b. 1666), who became an army contractor, made a fortune, and was a commissioner of the customs during the last four years of Queen Anne. Bolingbroke declared his knowledge of English commerce and finance to be unsurpassed. In 1716 he was elected a director of the South Sea Company. On the breaking of the bubble his property was confiscated by the act of pains and penalties, but he was allowed to retain 10,000l. out of an estate valued at 106,543l. 5s. 6d. He succeeded in making a second fortune almost equal to the first, and at his death in December 1736 was owner of a large landed property and of a ‘spacious house with gardens and lands’ at Putney. By his wife, daughter of Richard Acton, goldsmith in Leadenhall Street, a member of the Shropshire family, he was father of a son, Edward, and two daughters, Catherine, wife of Edward Elliston, whose daughter married Lord Eliot [see ], and Hester, who died unmarried in 1790. Hester was a disciple of (1686–1761) [q. v.], in whose ‘Serious Call’ she is said to be represented by ‘Miranda,’ while ‘Flavia’ represents her sister. Her religious views produced some difficulties with her family, though she remained upon civil terms with her nephew, the historian, and left him her money (see, Misc. Works, ii. 126, 345, 432; William Law; and [] Notes and Materials for Law's life: in the last is a letter from Gibbon in 1786). Law came into the family as tutor of Edward Gibbon, said to be the ‘Flatus’ of the ‘Serious Call.’ Edward was sent to Westminster and to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, whither Law accompanied him. After making the grand tour he was elected for Petersfield in 1734. He was a tory, if not a Jacobite, and took part in the final attack upon Sir Robert Walpole. He married Judith, daughter of James Porten, by whom he was the father of Edward Gibbon, born at Putney 27 April 1737. Five other sons and a daughter died in infancy, the daughter alone living