3 io NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 



the tenants could make money of it's stones or timbers. 

 Wantonness, no doubt, has had a share in the demolition ; 

 for boys love to destroy what men venerate and admire. 

 A remarkable instance of this propensity the writer can 

 give from his own knowledge. When a schoolboy, more 

 than fifty years ago, he was eye-witness, perhaps a party 

 concerned, in the undermining a portion of that fine old 

 ruin at the north end of Basingstoke town, well known by 

 the name of Holy Ghost Chapel. Very providentially* the 

 vast fragment, which these thoughtless little engineers en- 

 deavoured to sap, did not give way so soon as might have 

 been expected ; but it fell the night following, and with 

 such violence that it shook the very ground, and, awaken- 

 ing the inhabitants of the neighbouring cottages, made 

 them start up in their beds as if they had felt an earth- 

 quake. The motive for this dangerous attempt does not so 

 readily appear : perhaps the more danger the more honour, 

 thought the boys, and the notion of doing some mischief 

 gave a zest to the enterprize. As Dryden says upon another 

 occasion 



" It look'd so like a sin it pleas'd the more." 



Had the Priory been only levelled to the surface of the 

 ground, the discerning eye of an antiquary might have 

 ascertained it's ichnograpky, and some judicious hand 

 might have developed it's dimensions. But, besides other 

 ravages, the very foundations have been torn up for the 

 repair of the highways : so that the site of this convent is 

 now become a rough, rugged pasture-field, full of hillocks 

 and pits, choaked with nettles, and dwarf-elder, and trampled 

 by the feet of the ox and the heifer. 



As the tenant at the Priory was lately digging among 

 the foundations, for materials to mend the highways, 1 his 



1 Within the last twenty years the foundations of the old Priory have again 

 been ransacked to find stones for road-mending. It is a great pity that there 

 was no one interested enough in the antiquities of the place to make some exami- 

 nation of the form the foundations took. Some idea of the shape of the building 

 might have been gained, but if it was impossible to trace the remains of the 

 Priory when Gilbert White wrote 150 years ago, it is ten times more impossible 

 now. [R. B. S.] 



