Law William

Law, William (1686-1761), a celebrated English non-juror clergyman, chiefly known to later generations as the author of the Serious Call, a collection of half-allegorical sketches of men and women with morals appended, which owes much of its renown to Dr. Johnson's praise of it. He took Orders in 1711, but refused the oath of allegiance at the accession of George I. His life was thenceforward spent chiefly in comparative retirement at King's Cliffe, where he established a girls' school, and where dwelt two ladies in a kind of religious sisterhood, one of these ladies being a Miss Gibbon, of whose family at Putney Law had been an inmate in 1727. He was friendly with the Wesleys, who, however, found his views too mystic. Among his works were Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, an attack on Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, and a condemnation of the stage. The Serious Call appeared in 1728.