on the completion of his favourite plan for regulating friendly societies. Mr. Brookes died at Pentonville, near London, of a lingering consumption, aged fifty years.
1805, July 17. Died, John Farmer, a very worthy and industrious compositor, whose father is noticed at page 759, ante. He was born in Jewin-street, London, and acquired the rudiments of his profession in the office of William Bowyer, jun. Fortunately for him, he married a careful hard-working woman, by whose unremitting assiduities his latter years of painful existence were rendered comparatively comfortable. So long as he was able, he diligently followed his regular employment, and closed his labours in the office where they commenced, in the employment of Mr. John Nichols, partner and successor to Mr. Bowyer, who was one of the most intimate companions of his early days, and retained a real regard for him through life. After long confinement by a complication of disorders, he died at Clerkenwell, aged sixty.
1805, Sept. 27. The magistrates determine that the act which requires the name of the printer to be affixed to the first and last pages of a book, does not apply to loose sheets.
1805, Oct. 13. Died, Joseph Merrill, bookseller, at Cambridge, aged seventy years. It is recorded in Lysons's History of Cambridgeshire, page 153, that "In the year 1805, Mr. Joseph Merrill, of Cambridge, bookseller, bequeathed the sum of £1,667 bank stock to the trustees of Story's alms-houses, for the purpose of paying, by half yearly payments, the sum of £6 each to the eight poor persons of Jakenett's alms-houses; the remainder of the interest to be appropriated to the defraying of incidental expenses." In Great Mary's church-yard, Cambridge, there is the following epitaph on the two Mr. Merrill:
To the memory of
John Merrill, Esq. Alderman,
who served the office of Mayor in the year 1781,
He departed this life Oct. 17th, 1801, aged 70.
Also to the memory of
Joseph Merrill, Esq.
Brother of the above Merrill,
who departed this life Oct. 13th, 1805, aged 70.
1805, Dec. 12. Died, Henry Samson Woodfall, proprietor and printer of the Public Advertiser. He was the eldest son of Henry Woodfall, noted at page 720, ante, and born at the sign of the Rose and Crown, in Little Britain, on the 21st of June, 1739, O. S. Under the fostering attention of his grandfather, he received the rudiments of his education, and, before he had attained his fifth year, had the honour of receiving from Pope half-a-crown, for reading to him, with much fluency, a page of Homer, in the Greek language. He was afterwards sent to a respectable school at Twickenham; and at the age of little more than eleven years, he was removed to St. Paul's. On leaving that school he was taken apprentice by his father; and on attaining the age of nineteen, had committed to his charge the business of editing and printing the Public Advertiser, though his name did not appear to the paper till the 17th of November, 1760. From this period to the beginning of November, 1793, he continued uninterruptedly in the exercise of the laborious functions which a daily newspaper necessarily requires, more especially where the joint duties of editor and printer devolve on the same person, as in the case of Mr. Woodfall. During the course of so long a period, when parties ran extremely high, and particularly from the year 1769, when the celebrated Letters of Junius[1] first appeared under that signature, it is not surprising that a printer should have occasionally got into some difficulties; and this Mr. Woodfall, after he had retired from business, used to speak of not unpleasantly, and apparently with satisfaction; not with exultation, as acting in opposition to the then administration, but as having passed through the perils to which he had been subjected, in publishing the party effusions of the most able writers of the day, without any serious inconvenience to the comforts he then enjoyed. The punishments consequent upon his political transgressions formed, he said, a kind of anti-climax of retribution: that he had been fined by the house of lords; confined by the house of commons; fined and confined by the court of king's bench; and indicted at the Old Bailey. In the conduct of the Public Advertiser, however, he was strictly impartial; and notwithstanding the great and deserved popularity of Junius, yet, by a reference to his papers of that day, it will be seen that as many very able letters on the ministerial side of the question were admitted as on that of the opposition, and without any other preference than priority of receipt, or than the temporary nature of the subject would demand. With regard to the line of conduct he had adopted respecting his paper, in a pecuniary point of view, it was always most scrupulously honourable and correct; and, though frequently offered money to suppress certain articles of intelligence, not pleasant to the particular individual, yet never could be be prevailed upon to forego what he deemed to be his duty to the public, for any consideration of such a kind, however much to his personal advantage. Mr. Woodfall succeeded his father, as a printer, in Paternoster-row, in the year 1769; and, on being offered the common councilship, vacant by the death of his father, declined it, on the ground, as he jokingly said, that it was his duty to record great actions, not to perform them. Mr. Woodfall retired from business on the destruction of his printing-office by fire, in December, 1793, having parted with the Public Advertiser in the preceding November. The paper was discontinued about two years after Mr. Woodfall parted with it. Mr. Woodfall was master of the stationers' company in the year 1797, of which he had been a liveryman upwards of 45 years. He resided at Chelsea during the last twelve years of his life, occasionally visiting his old and numerous
- ↑ In 1812, Mr. George Woodfall, an eminent printer, and son of Mr, George Henry Woodfall, published the Letters of Junius with fac-similes of his hand-writing, 3 vols. 8vo.
