ATLES HOLT. 35 



The grantees that the author remembers, are, Brigadier- 

 General Emanuel Scroope Howe, and his lady, Ruperta, who 

 was a natural daughter of Prince Rupert, by Margaret 

 Hughs ; a Mr. Mordaunt, of the Peterborough family, who 

 married a dowager Lady Pembroke ; Henry Bilson Legge 

 and lady ; and now Lord Stawel, their son.* 



The lady of General Howe lived to an advanced age, long 

 surviving her husband ; and, at her death, left behind her 

 many curious pieces of mechanism of her father's construct- 

 ing, who was a distinguished mechanic and artist,t as well 

 as warrior : and, among the rest, a very complicated clock, 

 lately in possession of Mr. Elmer, the celebrated game 

 painter at Parnham, in the county of Surrey. 



Though these two forests are only parted by a narrow 

 range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different ; 

 for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, 

 carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to 

 be large timber ; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, 

 sandy, barren waste. 



The former, being all in the parish of Binsted, is about 

 two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much 

 from east to west, and contains within it many woodlands 

 and lawns, and the Great Lodge where the grantees reside, 

 and a smaller lodge called Goose Green ; and is abutted on 

 by the parishes of Kingsley, Frinsham, Farnham, and 

 Bentley, all of which have right of common. 



One thing is remarkable, that, though the Holt has been of 

 old well stocked with fallow-deer, unrestrained by any pales or 

 fences more than a common hedge, yet they were never seen 

 within the limits of Wolmer; nor were the red deer of Wolmer 

 ever known to haunt the thickets or glades of the Holt. 



At present the deer of the Holt are much thinned and 

 reduced by the night-hunters, who perpetually harass them, 



* At Lord Stawel's death, the property reverted to Heneage Legge, Esq., 

 afterwards to the Hon. Henry Legge and the Hon. and Rev. Augustus Legge, 

 at whose death it was inherited by his eldest son. ED. 



f Prince Rupert has long been the reputed inventor of mezzotinto,but it is 

 proved on sufficient authority that he was merely the introducer of the art into 

 this country. The invention was made in 1642, by a Dutchman named Lud- 

 wig von Siegen, who communicated it to Prince Rupert about the year 1654. 

 See full particulars in Bohn's edition of Walpole's Anecdotes of Painters 

 and Engravers, vol. Hi. p. i23. ED. o 



