256 The Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting. 
autograph letter of King Charles II. during his exile in Paris in 
1653; an autograph letter of Jacob, Lord Astley, to Prince Rupert 
in 1645; an autograph letter of Prince Rupert, 1666; and an auto- 
graph jetter of Henry IV. of France and Navarre, 1553. There 
was also an old engraving of Boscobel House, where King Charles 
II. was concealed after the Battle of Worcester: and there was a patent 
of nobility to Jean Baptiste Curto, signed by King Joseph Bonaparte, 
and captured from his carriage by General Sir Henry Fane; G.C.B., 
at the Battle of Vittoria, June 2lst, 1813. These were all in ad- 
mirable preservation, several of them beautifully written, and well 
protected under glass and in suitable frames. 
The proceedings opened at the Town Hall (which was tastefully 
draped for the occasion, and decorated with flowers and evergreens), 
at half-past two o’clock on Wednesday, August 22nd, with the 
following 
ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT 
of the Meeting, the Marquis of Bath :— 
Upon the former occasion of your visit to Warminster, in 1856, 
when you did me the honour of choosing me as your President, I 
was unable from some engagement to be present at the opening of 
the proceedings, and was obliged to ask your late vicar, Mr. Fane, 
to act as my representative. For reasons with which you are ac- 
quainted, I am now called upon in 1877 to do for another that which 
in 1856 another did for me. Though I should have been more 
pleased if the mantle of Sir John Lubbock had fallen upon some 
one better qualified to wear it, I proceed to discharge the duty that 
devolves to me by, in the first place, offermg you my hearty con- 
gratulations upon your revisiting this neighbourhood after so long 
an interval as twenty-one years. The Society indeed, returns, but 
not quite the same individually. Many of its earlier and more 
prominent members who came here before, have passed away alto- 
gether; and yet not altogether, for they have left in the pages of 
the Wiltshire Magazine proofs of the interest they took in the objects 
and the welfare of the Society, and therefore though no longer 
present with us, they have xo¢ vanished from our grateful recollect- 
ions, Perhaps there is none whose loss will be more regretted, or 
