XX 



Me. Anthony Meevtn Reeve Stoey-Maskelyne was born May 8th. 

 1791. He was descended from the family of Story, who were settled 

 at Know, in the county of Cumberland, but being Jacobites were 

 obliged to leave that part of the country after the Rebellion of 1715. 

 Mr. Story-Mask elyne's grandfather settled at Oxford soon after 1715, 

 and died there in 1751. He had a son, William Story, who was born 

 in 1734, and became rector of Hinton-Martell. county Dorset, on the 

 presentation of the Earl of Shaftesbury. This gentleman was the 

 father of the subject of the present memoir. Mr. Story-Maskelyne 

 lost his father early in life, but his mother survived her husband 

 till 1827. The care and education of her son fell to her, and Mr. 

 Story-Maskelyne often spoke with pride and gratitude of her de- 

 votion and judicious management. When he went up to Oxford 

 and entered at Wadham College he found himself far behind the 

 scholarship of the place, but with a spirit for work and a passion for 

 knowledge with which his mother had inspired him, he would tell 

 with some humour of his first essay for a scholarship, when, on a 

 friend inquiring "how he had done," the answer was that he had 

 made four false quantities in the first two lines of an ode of Horace. 

 But this remark was the spur to that undaunted effort which resulted 

 in the remarkable success of a " double-first." When Mr. Story- 

 Maskelyne took his " double-first," in 1810, aged just nineteen, 

 only three men before him had won that honour, Sir Robert Peel. 

 Mr. C. Bathurst, and the Rev. J. Keble ; and wjhen we remember his 

 imperfect preparation for Oxford and his final success, we can only be 

 astonished at the labour and the ability which were required and 

 expended to achieve it. The late Warden of Wadham, Dr. Symons, 

 was his tutor, and may well share the praise of such work. Mr. 

 Story-Maskelyne, having selected the bar as his profession, was 

 called in 1816, and went on the Western Circuit for five or six 

 years. He was a elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1823. 

 Tempting offers came to him afterwards. By his degree, he had made 

 himself a man of mark, and among others the Lord Shaftesbury of 

 that day proposed to him to bring him into Parliament for one of 

 those boroughs which, before the Reform Bill, were at the command 

 of their " owners." This Mr. Story-Maskelyne declined, for the 

 acceptance of the offer would have bound him to a party — perhaps 

 almost to the opinions of his patron, and it was the characteristic of 

 his mind then, and till the last, to be the independent master of his 

 own opinions. But it is most probable that his marriage with Miss 

 Margaret Maskelyne, the only child of the Rev. Dr. Maskelyne, F.R.S. 5 

 Astronomer Royal, gave the turn and character to his career which 

 continued to the end. Mr. Maskelyne's marriage took place in 1819, 

 and the ancient patrimony of the Maskelynes at Purton and Bassett 

 Down came with his wife, as sole heiress, to him, 



