the Rev. W. Turner , Jun. , MA., Lives of the eminent Unitarians

The subject of this memoir was born at Axminster, in Devonshire, December 17, 1700. His grandfather, the Rev. Matthew Towgood, was one of the venerable two thousand who witnessed a good confession on St. Bartholomew's-day, 1662. His descendant thus concludes a brief memoir of him inserted in Palmer's Nonconformist's Memorial,—‘I esteem it a greater honour to descend from one of these noble confessors than to have had a coronet or garter in the line of my ancestry. I look forward with joy to the approaching happy day, when that glorious list of heroes will shine with distinguished honours, and mount up to thrones of power, while their titled and enribboned persecutors will sink into shame, and be glad to hide their faces in the deepest obscurity.’ After having gone through the usual preparatory studies in the academy at Taunton, under the direction of the Rev. Messrs. James and Grove, to whom the dissenters of that day, in the West of England especially, were indebted for many of their most eminent and distinguished ministers, he was invited, in 1722, to settle with a congregation at Moreton-Hampstead, in the county of Devon. In early life his habit appeared consumptive, and his friends anticipated that his mortal course would be but of short duration: but by a strict attention to diet and exercise, and the uniform regularity of his life, he so far strengthened his constitution as to be preserved in the enjoyment of health, and the means of usefulness, to a very advanced age.