โ Scribed by A. B. Laver
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is probably best known for his translation, under the title of The Christian's Defence against the Fears of Death, of a treatise in French by Charles Drelincourt which offered advice on how to die well, and gave assurance of life after death. Defoe's A True Relation of the Apparition of me Mrs. Veal was bound with and probably helped to promote the sale of later editions of The Christian's Defence. D'Assigny noted that the apparition held the book in high esteem (10, sig. A3').
Marius D'Assigny was born in 1643 in St. Helier, Jersey, the son of the notorious Pierre D'Assigny, a Protestant minister who at the time was a leader of the faction aligned against the king's representative on Jersey early in the English Civil War (2,. Young Marius barely escaped death within the year when, during one of the periodic shellings of the town, a cannon ball landed in the fireplace before which he was being kept warm (31, p. 87). Shortly after, the family fled to Norwich, where, for six of the years before they returned to Jersey in 1651, the elder D'Assigny contended disgracefully with his wife's uncle for pastorship of the local French Walloon church (2, op. cit.; 27, pp. 233-4).
Voted a grant by a Jersey philanthropic body in 1653 to study at either Oxford or Cambridge (2, op. cit., p. 87), Marius D'Assigny seems instead to have attended unnamed "foreign universities." On the strength of these studies, and of three years service as a chaplain to the forces in the Tangiers garrison, he sought and was granted-by royal mandate and apparently without ever having attended the university-a Cambridge degree in divinity in 1668 (20, p. 425). From then until he retired, except for less than two years as a headmaster, he was vicar or rector at several small churches, most of them in the south of England. A worn stone in the nave of Woodham-Walter church in Essex records his death at 74 in 1717.
In the 1 6 7 0 ' ~~ he supplemented his income by translating and augmenting certain successful French books, and by writings on faith and on prayer. Twenty years later, he again took up the quill. His later works include somewhat scurrilous pamphlets attacking Baptist practices, and those Protestants who, on the death in France of James 11, acknowledged his son, James (the Old Pretender), as the lawful king of England. To this period belong a translation, from the French, of a history of the earls and earldom of Flanders, and a book in Latin, Rhetorica Anglorum, in which he referred to his recent treatise on memory (9, p. 166).
was published in London by Andrew Bell in 1697. Directed to the "young students of both Universities," that is, Oxford and Cambridge, studying for employment in church and state (ibid., p. v), it enjoyed a measure of success in its author's lifetime, for Bell published a second edition in 1699, corrected and slightly enlarged, with certain Latin passages translated into English, and a third in 1706.
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