published in 1820, while he was still at Ash. About two years later, he resigned from Ash and Ridley to become rector of Addington, where the small size and diminutive population of his parish provided additional scope for his literary activities. Amongst his works of that time were a memoir of his father, published in 1824, and the editing and publication in 1826 of ‘Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the use of Families and Young Persons’, which his uncle had completed shortly before his death in the previous year. The Doctor had so purified Shakespeare and Gibbon that his nephew was able to comment, in an editorial note, that they would no longer ‘raise a blush on the cheek of modest innocence nor plant a pang in the heart of the devout christian’.
   In 1834 Bowdler left Addington for Sydenham, from the heights of which he was later to participate in the counter-attack on the Tractarian movement. His life 

was not without sadness and in the eighteen-thirties he and Phoebe lost three of the five of their children who had survived infancy. He was left a widower in 1854 and himself died two years after. For the last seven years of his life he was a canon of St Paul’s.³¹
   For nearly ninety years after Thomas Bowdler’s departure, Ash Rectory was very much a Lambard preserve. Another Thomas Lambard was there until 1840 and he was followed by the Richard Salwey who had married Mary Lambard. For a year or two after Mary’s death, Salwey took his children to live with him in his other parsonage house, at Fawkham, nor was he at Ash when he died in extreme old age. Nevertheless, most of his incumbency well over half a century was spent at Ash Rectory and he must have lived there a good many years more than has anyone else. After his time, the family name recurs for