By the Rev. J. Ward. 



289 



Physician in Ordinary to King Charles II. He published many 

 medical works, of which his treatise on the Anatomy of the Brain 

 is the most celebrated, and highly valued in the present day. He 

 was zealously attached to the Church, and constantly attended daily 

 prayer even in the troublous times of the Revolution, when he 

 established a private Chapel in his house at Oxford, and used the 

 then proscribed Liturgy of the Church. In London he invariabty 

 attended early prayer at St. Martins'-in-the-Fields, and at his death 

 left an endowment of £20 a year for the continuation of that ser- 

 vice. He was extremely liberal to the poor, although frugal and 

 self-denying in his own habits. He died of pleurisy on the 11th 

 of Nov., 1675, his wife having predeceased him on the Yigil of All 

 Saints, 1670. Both were buried in the north transept of "West- 

 minster Abbey, where there is an inscription to their memory. 

 He left one son, Thomas, of Whaddon Hall and Bletchley in 

 Buckinghamshire, father of the antiquary Browne Willis; and 

 two daughters, Jane married to Robert Symonds, Esq., High She- 

 riff for Herefordshire in the last year of William III. ; and Rachel 

 married to Roger Lingen, of Radhook in Gloucestershire, Esq. 

 There is an admirable engraving of Dr, Willis, by Yertue. 



In Aubrey's MS. description of the Northern Division of Wilt- 

 shire, preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, and printed by Sir 

 Thomas Phillipps, Bart., from which we have already given (p. 284) 

 the minute account of the heraldry on Sir John Seymour's monu- 

 ment as it was in 1672, we also read of some stained glass then extant 

 in the church, and also that the chancel was fitted up with stalls. 



In Gough's Camden, (vol. i. p. 158) is given a strange engrav- 

 ing of a figure on crutches, copied by Gough from Stukeley, and 

 by him from Le Neve, who pretended to have found it described 

 in some book in the Library at Holkham as the representation of 

 a priest formerly in the east 'window of Great Bedwyn Church. 

 As no such book can now be found at Holkham, as the dress is not 

 sacerdotal, and the subject is utterly unsuitable to the east window 

 of any church, it is considered that Le Neve, or his alleged author- 

 ity, was altogether mistaken, and that the whole story may be 

 safely rejected. 



