Hengwrt, and now, by bequest from Sir Robert Vaughan, belonging to my friend Mr. Wynne of Peniarth. I observe that he is among the verbal authorities quoted in the Welsh dictionary of the learned Dr. Richards. His house and land were by the mere-side at Hanmer; he is said by some to have been a member of the family, and the position of his property rather warrants this idea. There is a legend that being an owner of a portion of the water, all the rights in which were bought up by Richard Hanmer of Hanmer and his son Sir Thomas, he sold what belonged to him to the former, for a noble, but I am sorry I cannot trace him, as I could desire.

Outside the wall of the south aisle, and nearly about its centre, there is an oblong stone tomb, with the hat of some ecclesiastic dignitary yet faintly visible upon it, and this tradition ascribes to the architect of the church, but his name has passed away. It is always good to pause before tradition; unless we stop to listen, we cannot hear the whispers of the wind. I here accordingly pause over these gleanings of local antiquity, to collect which was first and frequently suggested to me by the late Bishop of St. Asaph. He was long our diocesan, and grew into one of our oldest

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friends, and he rarely came to Bettisfield without endeavouring to persuade me to attempt something of the kind. I will only say that I have not done so in the spirit of those who have no other friends than their ancestors; rather, I hope, that my pages may conduce to some not impartial recollections of me, within the locality they relate to, in future time.

PART II.

FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH INTO

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

"In such green palaces the first kings reigned,
Slept in their shades, and angels entertained,
With such old counsellors they did advise,
And by frequenting sacred groves grew wise."

WALLER.

BEGIN this portion of local notes with the trees, old and young, of which the more I plant, the more I find oak and beech and fir the best suited to our soil and climate;

the lime also grows very well, shooting up quickly, sweet with its delicate flowers; it might be fancied likely to be short-lived, yet it seems to last as long as any of them: I have seen one

near Nuremberg to which tradition assigns the date of a thousand years. Standing in ancient woods, or in groups about our dwellings, trees are among the simplest and the most beautiful of our connections with the past; the hands of those we reckon from have planted, their eyes have gazed upon them; they have seen the stars in winter through their leafless boughs, and have heard the murmuring and the singing of the birds when summer clothed the branches; good tidings and the reverse have been heard beneath their shade; their stems typify the firmness with which we should meet either fortune. They will even endure ill-treatment at our hands and recover from it, a thing most arduous and rare in human

nature.

We have not now many old trees; nevertheless the oaks which were long growing in park and hedgerow here have left their memory behind them, and I have heard that they were what first caught the eye of a very fair lady, whose date here marks the eighteenth century, with which we are now beginning, I mean the former Duchess of Grafton, when she came to Bettisfield, upon her marriage with Sir Thomas Hanmer. But there were legends of their size and number of a much later

date, for they lasted into this century, and even into my life, though I do not remember them; until in the course of the great French war they went the way of all timber, leaving us some younger ones for futurity, to which I may claim to have added my proportion, including the oak avenue towards Hanmer and the Mere, and we have yet some large trees too aged for the axe, whose hollow trunks and branches rear and shelter many generations of owls. "Out sterte the owl with Benedicite," says Chaucer in his "Court of Love;" but a few years ago there was a lively battle between some bees and owls for possession of a tree, in which the bees came off the victors, and the owls, who were not the assailants, had to muffle up their feathers and come out like any Irish Churchmen. Honey was one of the accounted profits of woods in feudal times, and I have seen a bright comb hanging from the smooth bough of a young oak by the park side, as well as those which habitually are built in the interstices of the great old ones in the flower garden. The lady of whom tradition tells that she was pleased with the sight of these ancient trees was Isabella, daughter of Lord Arlington, King Charles the Second's minister, and widow of the son of