He was born, in the old seat of the family at Towneley Hall, on the 1st of October, 1737. [Sidenote: LIFE OF CHARLES TOWNELEY.] His father, William TOWNELEY, had married Cecilia, sole daughter and heir of Richard STANDISH, by his wife Lady Philippa HOWARD, daughter of Henry, Duke of NORFOLK. The hall—which has not yet lost all its venerable aspect—was built in part by a Sir John TOWNELEY in the reign of HENRY VIII, and its older portions (turrets, gateway, chapel, and library) suit well the fine position of the building, and the noble woods which back it. Of the founder two things still remain in local tradition and memory. He took the changes made under the rule of HENRY—or rather of Thomas CROMWELL—so much in dudgeon, that when Lancaster Herald came to Towneley, upon his Visitation, he refused to admit him, saying, ‘Do not trouble thyself. There are no more gentlemen left in Lancashire now than my Lord of DERBY, and my Lord MONTEAGLE.’ The other tradition of this same Sir John is, that he enclosed a common pasture called Horelaw, and so made the peasantry as angry with his innovations as he was with CROMWELL’S. Some of their descendants may yet chance to assure the inquisitive stranger, that his ghost still haunts the park, crying aloud in the dead of night— ‘Lay out! lay out![61] Horelaw and Hollingley Clough!’ At Douay Charles TOWNELEY received a careful education, moulded, of course, under the conditions and the memories of that celebrated College. When he left its good priests he was already the owner of the family estates—his father having died prematurely in 1742—and he was plunged, at once, into the gaieties and temptations of Paris. All the Mentorship he had was that of a great uncle who had become sufficiently naturalised to win the friendship of VOLTAIRE, and to be able to turn _Hudibras_ into excellent French. The dissipations of the Capital overpowered, for a time, the real love of classical studies which had been excited in the provincial college. But the seed had been sown in a good soil. The study of art and of classical archæology, in particular, presently reasserted its claims and renewed its attractions. It was a fortunate circumstance, too, that family affairs required the presence of Mr. TOWNELEY in England on the attainment of his majority. He had left Towneley very young. He came back to it with more of the foreigner than of the Englishman in his ways of life and manners. But he was able to win the genuine regard of his neighbours, and to take his fair share in their pursuits and sports, although he could never—at least in his own estimation—succeed in expressing his thoughts with as much ease and readiness in English as in French. Late in life, he would speak of this conscious inability with regret. Whether needfully or not, the feeling, no doubt, prevented Mr. TOWNELEY from turning to literary account his large acquirements.