1 66 HISTORY OF HARTING. 



of his contemporaries, was a staunch Jacobite. Collins, 

 the quiet-loving, indolent, irresolute boy, in appearance 

 almost an Albino, and delicate, at the head of the roll 

 in 1740, would choose neither side. At this time, 

 according to Lord Elcho's diary, there was little dis- 

 cipline at Winchester. The boys played cards, haunted 

 taverns, and their morals were entirely neglected. "We 

 did not learn Latin and Greek," writes Lord Elcho, 

 " as well as we should have done had we been placed 

 with a private tutor, but we were taught how to live 

 as men of the world, and made acquaintances which, 

 if cultivated, could be very useful to us in after life." 

 Among these contemporaries of Lord Ossulstone at 

 Winchester College were the sons of the Dukes of 

 Hamilton, Devonshire, and Queensborough, and the 

 Earls of Exeter and Coventry.* 



Collins must have known Harting well, as it lay 

 almost half-way from Chichester to Winchester, and 

 subsequently, when he was scholar of Magdalen, Ox- * 

 ford, where he took his degree in 1/43, it must have 

 been a first stage on the coaches. And though the 

 old road would take him from Chilgrove across the 

 outskirts of Uppark, and along Hemnor to St. 

 Richard's Hill, where it left the downs for Petersfield, 

 yet from first to last of his life he had many calls to 

 visit our land-locked lowlands at South and West 

 Harting. Mr. Moy Thomas, in his excellent Life of 

 Collins,f has noted that "several Collinses, who," he 

 believes, were connections of the poet, " lived at Hart- 

 ing." The name of Collins is as old at Harting as the 

 time of Henry VIII. In 1724 James Collins was 

 clerk of the parish Church. Henry and Richard Collins 

 were tenants of the Carylls, and their possession is re- 

 corded, as has been said, by the still current name of 

 " Collin's Lane " for 240 years in West Harting.J In 



Ewald's " Life of Prince Charles Stewart," i., 76. 



t Life of Collins, Aldine Edition. 



J " Colline's land and Buckland's Hill," W. Harting Leager, 

 1635. " Collins' Six Acres." No. 509, Tithe Map, 1841. 



