Samuel Chandler (1693 – 8 May 1766) was an English Nonconformist minister and pamphleteer. He has been called the "uncrowned patriarch of Dissent" in the latter part of George II's reign. Early life Samuel Chandler was born at Hungerford in Berkshire, the son of Henry Chandler (d.1719), a Dissenting minister, and his wife Mary Bridgeman. His father was the first settled Presbyterian minister at Hungerford since the Toleration Act 1688. In or around 1700 the family moved to Bath, where for the remainder of his life Henry ministered to the congregation that met at Frog Lane. He was the younger brother of the Bath poet Mary Chandler, whose biography he wrote for inclusion in Theophilus Cibber's The Lives of the Poets (1753). As a child he displayed an 'early genius for learning', and this was encouraged by his family. He excelled in the classics and is said to have already mastered Greek by the time he entered the dissenting academy at Bridgwater, where he was a student of the Rev John Moore (d.1747). He later attended Samuel Jones' academy at Gloucester. Here he was a contemporary of Bishop Butler and Archbishop Secker, who in spite of their later churchmanship and high preferment remained life-long friends. Career In 1714 Chandler began a preaching ministry in London. During this time he shared a house with Secker, who had returned to England after studying in Leiden. In 1716 he was chosen as minister of the Presbyterian Hanover Chapel in Peckham and ordained in December of that year. Through the South Sea Bubble crash of 1720 Chandler lost the fortune which his wife had brought to their marriage. This left him in straitened circumstances, and from about 1723 he supplemented his income by working as a bookseller at the Cross Keys in the Poultry, London. In 1725, having read his recently published 'A 'Vindication of the Christian Religion, Archbishop Wake wrote to him expressing surprise that 'so much good learning and just reasoning in a person of your profession, and do think it pity you should not rather spend your time in writing books than in selling them'. It was partly due to the success of A Vindication, which brought together sermons he had delivered at the Old Jewry Meeting-house in defence of Christian revelation, that Chandler was invited to be the assistant minister under Thomas Leavesley at the Old Jewry in 1726. During