Page:Life of Daniel Dancer Esq..pdf/2



was born in 1716, in the hamlet of Weald, in the neighbourhood of Harrow. He was descended from a respectable yeoman's family in the county of Hertford, and his grandfather appears to have been settled at Bushy, near Watford, where he followed the profitable occupations of mealman and maltster. His father who resided at Stone causeway, on Harrow Weald Common possessed considerable property in land, which he farmed himself: he had four children, three sons and a daughter; and on his death, in 1736, his eldest son Daniel succeeded to the estate.

It has somewhere been asserted, that there never yet were three suecessivesuccessive [sic] generations of misers; the Dancers, however, form a special exception to this rule, for it is an undoubted fact, that the grandfather, the father, and all the children, were strictly entitled to this appellation! Their characters, however, were of a peculiar cast; for it was the ambition and the occupation of their lives, not to accumulate for the sake of their offspring, or relatives, or posterity, or themselves, but from the same principle that the magpie is said to steal gold—merely for the pleasure of hiding it!

The contemporaries of the grandfather are now no more, and but few traditional anec-