112 HISTORY OF HARTING. 



our resident squire for about forty-seven years, and 

 connected with Halting for fifty-four), was in gaol at 

 Chichester and Horsham eleven weeks in all, on sus- 

 picion of being concerned in the same plot of Sir Geo. 

 Barclay's for which his uncle was outlawed. As soon 

 as the Squire was liberated he compounded with Lord 

 Cutts for the purchase of his uncle's life interest, and 

 eventually purchased it for 6000, a high sum,* seeing 

 that his uncle was at that moment seventy-one years 

 of age, and also very infirm. But the entrance of a 

 stranger would doubtless have been disastrous to the 

 property, the new house and its furniture would have 

 been ruined, and the large woodlands of Lady Holt 

 and West Harting would have suffered by the alien's 

 axe. 



The completion of this compromise took place in 

 May, 1697, as appears pleasantly by the entry in the 

 " Squires " account book : " Given the ringers at Hart- 

 ing upon y e Composition with Lord C, I : 2 : o." 

 At that very time Steele was acting as Secretary to' 

 Lord Cutts; and Mr. Elwin thinks that Steele was thus 

 brought into close personal communication with John 

 Caryll " the Squire," whose genial nature and literary- 

 taste at once made a friend of him, and who was thus 

 able to introduce to Steele his friend Pope, a service 

 which Pope acknowledged in an early letter to Caryll. 

 It is thus a fact of breathless interest to our parish of 

 Harting that Pope owed his introduction to Sir Richard 

 Steele, and hence to Addison, to the settlement of the 

 West Harting estates in 1696. But for West Harting 

 " Ye Nymphs of Solyma " might never have appeared 

 in the " Spectator."! 



Another pleasant reminiscence of this transaction 

 is, that the East Harting squire, Ford, Lord Grey, at 

 this time high in power with William III. as Lord 



Luttrell says .8000 under Nov. 9, 1697, but Caryll (the 

 squire) himself writes .6000 in his letter to his uncle. Caryll 

 Correspondence, I., p. 492. 



t See "Athenaeum," May 8, 1858. Elwin's "Pope," vi., 144. 



