THE HAMPSHIRE ANTIQUARY &> NATURALIST. 



A CHRISTCHURCH EPITAPH. 

 The following is to be seen in Christchurch burial 

 ground : 



\Ve were not slayne, but raysed ; 



Raysed not to lyfe, 

 But to be buryed twice 



By men of stryfe ; 

 \Vhat rest could lyving have 



When dead had none ? 

 Agree among you ; 



Here are ten to one ! 



This epitaph refers to one Henry Rogers, who died 

 April 17, 1641. Various suppositions as to its meaning 

 have been hazarded. Southey believes that it refers 

 to ten men who were killed by a fall of earth in a 

 gravel pit, and dug out to be buried ; whilst another 

 writer supposes that they were ten Royalists, whose 

 bones were dug up by Cromwell ; but the first line, 

 " We were not slayne" sufficiently confutes the latter 

 supposition. 



J. DORE. 



THE HAMPSHIRE INDEPENDENT, February 22, 1890. 



ANTIQUARIAN FIND AT BITTERN. 

 I happened, a day or two ago, to be up on the 

 Bittern estate just by where the 'bus stops, and I 

 saw a man on the left excavating and levelling. So, 

 going over to him, I said " Come across anything of 

 any value about here in your turning over of this good 

 soil ? " " No," said he, " hardly anything at all, but 

 just there,'' he observed, "is a fine old yew tree, which 

 in levelling we found buried." I went across to see, 

 and there was an old yew tree, with bark eaten off, 

 laid at its length, and almost as hard as ever. It had 

 laid there buried nobody knows how long who can 

 tell ? No hand of man planted the buried yew tree 

 on the Bittern estate. The trees themselves live 1,000 

 years, and to live and be buried, and nobody doing it, 

 must take time and time again. Said one of the men, 

 "You know the well on the Common, and that 

 it's down several hundred feet." I said " Yes, I 

 know." "Well," he remarked, "a part of 

 a tree was found right away down there, 

 and it was brought up and preserved. 

 Do you remember the great finds made 12 or more 

 years ago out to\vards Swathling ? " I said, " Yes, I 

 remember.' 7 He said, "That was the place to find 

 things, but we valued them not. Urns and crockery of 

 every description I found there, and found continually. 

 One da}- I came across a small jar of about 200 Roman 

 coins, and another day we came across a huge trench 

 in which there must have been at least 200 horses' 

 heads, almost as sound as they could be, till the air 

 got to them. Then we found grain pressed in all 

 sorts of ways, still sound, or getting black." I re- 

 marked " Yes, and why is it a lot of it got down to 

 Dorchester Museum ?" " O ! " said he, " the men in 



charge of the engines took many things, urns, &c., 

 down thereand sold them. Some, too, went to Salisbury 

 Museum. We did not value the finds as we ought. 

 I would like," he said, " to find some now, I would 

 know what I was at better. There was one old 

 gentleman who came out in a cab from Southampton 

 most days, and he picked up any stray bit of anything 

 and fancied himself rich with shards and so forth. 

 Many of the coins we found we sold for a song at 

 first, but later the railway company claimed the most 

 they could." P. 



IZAAK WALTON. 



The Atlantic Monthly for February contains a re- 

 view of a recently published American edition of 

 Walton's " Complete Angler," * which is introduced 

 by an editorial essay by Mr. Lowell. "Type and 

 page are all that can be desired even in an edition de 

 luxe, and there are a great number of illustrations ap- 

 propriate to the text, including several portraits. . . 

 Mr. Lowell's essay is biographical in form, such as 

 an editor would naturally write ; it contains the facts 

 of the author's life, a discussion of the vexed points 

 in his career and in his literary work, an account by 

 the way of some of his friends, and a personal and 

 critical characterization. . . . He takes pains to 

 show Walton in his own dress and habits, and to 



make sensible the charm of his presence 



So even is the flow cf Mr. Lowell's thought and nar- 

 rative that one hardly feels the successive touches, 

 but is surprised te find Walton almost at once a man 

 already known and familiar. ... It is unneces- 

 sary to say that Mr. Lowell has mingled with the 

 lines of this portrait something of himself, and in 

 drawing it has occasionally stopped to say a word of 

 his own upon a variety of topics naturally arising in 

 connection with the subject. ... It results from 

 this that the reader not only obtains a truthful and 

 living portrait of Walton, full of intelligence and sym- 

 pathy with his shy and withdrawn genius, and 

 touched with a poet's appreciation of a peculiarly 

 gentle and open nature, but together with this he sees 

 Walton in the light of that criticism which takes pro- 

 portion and justice from the widest acquaintance with 

 literature in its whole compass." 



THE BASINGSTOKE CANAL. 

 Messrs. Baigent and Millard have told us in their 

 "History of Basingstoke" that the London and 

 Basingstoke Canal was opened in 1789, " an act for 

 making a navigable canal from the town of Basing- 

 stoke to communicate with the river Wey in the 

 parish of Chertsey, Co. Surrey, and to the south-east 



* " The Complete Angler, or the Contemplative Man's 

 Recreation of Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton." With 

 an Introduction by James Russell Lowell, 2 vols. Boston, 

 U.S. : Little, Brown & Co. 1889. 



