Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 11.djvu/270

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NOTES AND QUERIES, DP* B. XL APRIL 4, iws.


and Dorcas, and grandfather of Dr. Temple and the writer's mother-in-law, was of Bar- tilliver and Carvossa in Probus. He married Margaret Andrew, 11 May, 1769, aunt of Susan, the wife of Admiral Temple above, uncle of the Archbishop. The Carveths and the Tresahars, neighbours, bore similar arms, metal and colour counterchanged (see monu- ment, Luxyllian Church), from which it would seem that granting arms was once subject to the whim of the visiting herald.

Dr. Temple, when at Exeter, was occa- sionally my guest. In 1873 the members of the Archaeological Institute visited Exeter, and those who with me were guests of the Bishop will agree that our host, so far from being grim and unbending, as reported, was genial, jovial, jocular. Wine, set liberally on the table, was untouched by him. Leaving us to our own devices, he, returning un- fa tigued by a long day's travel and travail, would sit at a side table sipping tea, reading through a pile of letters, and methodically arranging them for answering.

A huge monument, styled a mausoleum by Jenkins (' Hist, of Exeter') and known as the Fursman monument, once stood in front of a window in the cathedral. Before the opposite window stands the Carew monument, resplendent with gold and colour. Being the one chiefly interested in the preservation of these two monuments, I frequently stopped on my way to London expressly to look them over. At last, to my amazement, the mauso- leum vanished, and I naturally felt aggrieved. When I mentioned the circumstance to Dr. Temple, he quietly asked if I thought the monument ought to have been placed where it was. I perceived at once that Chancellor Fursinan had abused his power, and that if the monument ought not to have been there I ought not to regret the removal. Dr. Temple's pithy rebuke was the gentle prick of a rapier, as telling as a blow from a bludgeon.

A digression may be of interest, since Polwhele devotes more than a folio page to the Fursman monument ('Hist. Devon,' ii. 22-3), Jenkins about two pages 8vo (' Hist. Exeter,' 308-9), and Britton a note, p. 134, and plate iv. ('Hist. Exeter Cathedral'). Strangers coming across the structure as it now stands dismembered, in a small side chapel, might question its identity. Polwhele blazons the arras on three escutcheons, under a pediment at the back, without identifying them : (1) The arms appertaining to the Chancellorship, impaling Fursman. (2) Furs- man impaling Radcliff. John Fursman married Martha Radcliff. (3) Quarterly, 1


and 4, Fursman ; 2, Rowe of Lamerton ; 3, Fitz of Fitzford. Chancellor Fursman obtained a grant (penes me) from his personal friend Anstis, Garter, merely to adorn this monument. It will repay the reader to look up the grant in the Genealogist, ii. 65 (1878), and permit omissions here. When the treaty of Utrecht was signed, 1713, Henry Manaton (named on the monument), being a member of Parliament, received the gold medal (penes me) struck in commemoration. I possess the portrait of the Chancellor, painted by Hudson, one of the masters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and that of his daughter, by William Gandy, the other master of whom Sir Joshua wrote : " Paint like Gandy, as though your brush had been dipped in honey." (See also Northcote's' Life of Reynolds,' i. 22.) The Chancellor expressed on the monument his desire to be buried with his wife and daughter, "Et cum illarum cineribus suos etiam adrnisceri cupit " ; but his visitor, a youth, son of John Gilbert, Archbishop of York, and brother of Lady Mount-Edgcumbe, died at his house, and was buried in their vault The Chancellor lies in the opposite aisle, and the very magnificence of his monu- ment, instead of ensuring its preservation, caused its mutilation and removal.

To take up again the thread of my narra- tive, let me say that few pedestrians out- matched the Archbishop. When reading at Duloe with the Rev. R. Scott, the lexico- grapher (Liddell and Scott), he frequently walked fifteen miles to Plymouth, of an after- noon, to visit my wife's family, and returned the same evening. I took him to see an open tin mine in Cornwall, said to have been worked by the Romans. As the road for some distance was very steep, to test his powers I gradually forced the pace to my utmost, but without affecting him. I re- marked, " You can walk fast. I have walked about twenty-one miles at the rate of four and a third an hour." "Yes," he replied; " I could easily walk five miles an hour." I said I had walked fifty miles in one day, as computed. He then told me that he had walked out fifty miles in one day, and back again the next.

We went to Bartilliver, his mother's birth- place. The hospitable lady of the house directed us to some rising ground overlooking the whole farm. The lady, an ardent polemic of the day, tried to start an argument. The Bishop stepped out; she trotted after, delivered her attack, and fell back repeatedly till her strength gave out, and all was serene. She had given orders that an old labourer, on the farm from boyhood, should await our