ting back his money, lest, on breaking again with the church, the whole should be forfeited. He pretended that he had engaged in an illicit intercourse with a lady, to whom the money in reality belonged, and that, in order to disengage himself from a connection which lay heavily upon his conscience, he wished to refund the money. Accordingly, on the 20th of June, 1747, he received it back. If we are to believe himself, he did not lend the money to Shirburn, but to Mr Hill, a Jesuit, who transacted money affairs in his capacity as an attorney. He retracted it, he said, in order to be able to marry. The letters shown as having been written by him to father Shirburn, were, he said, forgeries prepared by catholics in order to destroy his popularity with the protestants. But the literary world has long settled the question against Bower. The letters were published in 1756, by his countryman Dr John Douglas, afterwards bishop of Salisbury, along with a commentary proving their authenticity. The replies of Bower, though ingenious, are by no means satisfactory, and it is obvious that the whole transaction proves him to have been a man who little regarded principle, when he had the prospect of improving his fortune.
The first volume of his History of the Popes, was published in 1748; and he was soon after, by the interest of Lord Lyttleton, appointed librarian to Queen Caroline. It must be remarked that this irreproachable nobleman remained the friend of Bower, while all the rest of the world turned their backs upon him; and it must be confessed, that such a fact is calculated to stagger the faith of many even in the acuteness of Bishop Douglas. On the 4th of August, 1749, when he had just turned the grand climacteric, he married a niece of Bishop Nicholson, with a fortune of £4000. In 1751, he published his second volume, and, in 1753, his third, which brought down the history to the death of Pope Stephen. This work, partly from the circumstances of the author, appears to have been received with great favour by the dissenters and more devout party of the church. Bower is alleged by his enemies to have kept up the interest of the publication, by stories of the danger in which he lay from the malignity of the Catholics, who, as he gave out, attempted on one occasion to carry him off by water from Greenwich. Lord Lyttleton, in April 1754, appointed him clerk of the buck warrants. It was in 1756, that his personal reputation received its first grand shock from the exposure of Dr Douglas, who next year published a second tract, as fully condemnatory of his literary character. This latter production, entitled, "Bower and Tillemont Compared," showed that a great part of his History of the Popes was nothing more than a translation of the French historian. He endeavoured to repel the attack in three laboured pamphlets; but Dr Douglas, in a reply, confirmed his original statements by unquestionable documents. Before the controversy ended, Bower had issued his fourth volume, and, in 1757, an abridgment of what was published appeared at Amsterdam. The fifth volume appeared in 1761, during which year he also published "Authentic Memoirs concerning the Portuguese Inquisition, in a series of letters to a friend," 8vo. The History of the Popes was finally completed in seven volumes; and on the 3rd of September, 1766, the author died at his house in Bond Street, in the eighty-first year of his age.[1] He was buried in Mary-le-bone church-yard, where there is a monument to him, bearing the following inscription:
"A man exemplary for every social virtue. Justly esteemed by all who knew him for his strict honesty and integrity. A faithful friend and a sincere Christian.
"False witnesses rose up against him, and laid to his charge things that he
- ↑ A letter written at the request of his widow to notify his death to his nephew in Scotland (which I have seen,) mentions that he bore a final illness of three weeks "in every way suitable to the character of a good Christian."
