106 * PAPERS, ETC. 



Thom'^s Matheu. 



Wyir Bayly. 



P' me Nycolam Ber'm. 



P' me Joh'nem Haywerd. 



Thomas Dale. 



P' me WiU'm Culrun. 



P' me Joh'nem Warryn. 



P' me Willyelmu' P'son. 



John Cokeram. 



P' me Wyll'm Brynsmede." * 

 That man must be possessed of a hard and cruel heart, 

 who can look at these signatures in the original document 

 without emotion. The writer of the present lines can 

 lay clalm to no such apathy. To him these unsteady and 

 hesitating characters are a most deeply affecting indication 

 of agonized hearts and trembling hands, of a conviction 

 that all that Avas dear was not only at the mercy of a 

 sacrllegious tyrant but was gone for ever, of desolation and 

 despair of soul from the knowledge that almost before 

 those letters should have become dry the havoe and 

 pillage would begin — that all that was left to them of their 

 beloved and beautiful home was a wretched pension depen- 

 dent on the caprice of implacable enemies, and that their 

 future was a life-long wandering over a new and inex- 

 perienced world. 



Nothing now remained but the destruction of the House 

 and the division of the spoil. The very style and title of 

 the place henceforth disappears, and it becomes "nuper 

 Prioratus de Tauuton modo dissolutus." Of the last scene 

 I can furnish no memorial. No letter is known to exist of 

 some sacrilegious commissioner recounting from Taunton 



* Ex autograph. in Off. Rcc. olini Augment. 



