Page:Protestant Exiles from France Agnew vol 1.djvu/261

 most remarkable and representative relics of his life. All that he printed consisted of articles in Archaeologia, and in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society:—

1. A Letter to Mr. Gale on the Icening street and other Roman roads in England. Anno 1735 (Arch. vol. i.)

2. A Letter to Mr. Gale, relating to the shrine of St. Hugh, the crucified child, at Lincoln. Anno 1736.

3. A Letter to Mr. G. Vertue, relating to some antiquities at Bordeaux in France.

4. Observations on Sepulchral Monuments, in a letter to James West, Esq. (Arch, vol. ii.)

5. An account of the burning of the steeple at Danbury by lightning. Anno 1749. (Phil. Trans., vol. xlvi. p. 611).

Mr. Collinson describes him as “a gentleman every way eminent for his excellent endowments.” Another panegyrist calls him “an excellent scholar, a polite gentleman, and universally esteemed by all the learned men of his time.” These feelings are more fully brought out in the epitaph upon his tomb at Little Ilford : —

[The following sentence in the Grenville Papers refers perhaps to his scientific and antiquarian collections:— Earl Temple to Mr. Wilkes, Stowe, October 29, 1761, “I gave your paper concerning Mr. Lethieullier to Mr. Pitt, who with great pleasure promised to obey your commands.”]  

Anthony Lefroy was born on 10th December 1703, the eldest child and ultimately the only son of Thomas Lefroy, of Canterbury, and Phoebe Thompson, his wife (see my memoir of this family). He was apprenticed by his father to Mr. Mark Weyland (or Wayland), a merchant in London. He had not completed his twentieth year when his father died (3d November 1723), and the widowed mother removed to Bartlett Buildings in London, to be near her son. Her brother, young Lefroy’s uncle, had taken a great interest in him. This Major Edward Thomson, who was quartered in Ireland, wrote to his sister on 29th March 1721, “I had a letter from my best nephew Anthony very lately; he has made a good use of his time, and writes an incomparable good hand, fitt for the business he is put to.” Anthony Lefroy went out to Leghorn in the end of 1728; it is said that he had obtained a share in the house of Langlois & Son. At that date Miss Elizabeth Langlois was only eight years of age; to her he was married nearly ten years afterwards, viz., on February 27, 1738. This young wife had four brothers. Of these, Christopher, John, and Benjamin, were bachelors to the end, and concentrated all their father-like affection upon their sister’s children. (Her other brother, Peter, was Field-Marshal-Lieutenant and Grand Master of the Ordnance in the Austrian service.) Mr Anthony Lefroy was energetic and successful in business, and founded a house of his own. He also devoted himself to the study of antiquities, and was elected a Member of the Etrusca Academia in 1753. He seems to have been a Levant merchant, and to have prosecuted a commercium nobile in plures Asiaticas regiones. His wonderful collection of medals contained coins of Asia, Cappadocia, Pergamos, Numidia, Mauritania, Cyrene, Syria, Egypt, Pontus, Thracia, Parthia, Paconia. These with his other collections were brought into public notice through a reverse of fortune which overtook him in 1763. An elaborate catalogue with a preface was drawn up, and is still known as the Catalogus Numismaticus Musei Lefroyani. There was some hope that the King of Great Britain might be induced to buy the 