45 



t;|e gitUtcott gtsenb. 



To the Editor of the Wilts Magazine. 



Sir, 



Our friend and associate Mr. Charles E. Long, is indefatigable 

 in his search after matter that may illustrate the Littlecote legend. 

 Unluckily he committed himself to a strong opinion of its purely 

 mythical character in his first notice of the subject in our pages 

 (vol. iv. p. 222). His second communicated several interesting 

 documents, which in the interval had been discovered at the Rolls 

 Office, in his own phrase " bringing to light some startling incidents 

 in the eccentric and not very creditable career " of the hero, "Wild 

 Darell, and therefore lending some probability to the tale ; but not 

 enough it would seem to lessen Mr. Long's " unbelief" in it. (vol. 

 vi. p. 214). His third paper, however, in our last Number, gives 

 as the result of a j-^et more recent discovery, two more remarkable 

 documents which do not appear to have mitigated Mr. Long's 

 scepticism, but seem to me in my simplicity to affiird the most 

 striking and unexpected testimony to the substantial truth of the 

 story. These are, first, the veritable deposition, in the handwriting 

 of the magistrate who took it, of the old midwife herself, who 

 states that she was fetched by men on horseback, by night, carried 

 a long (and probably round about) journey to a great house into 

 which she was introduced mysteriously by a gentleman in black 

 velvet, who required her to deliver a masked lady lying in a splen- 

 did bed, and threw the child, as soon as it was born, into the fire, 

 sending the old woman back again the next night with the same 

 precautions ; — a document therefore of first-rate authority as 

 evidence, " confirming," as indeed Mr. Long admits (p. 390 vol. vi.) 

 " in nearly every particular," the tale told on traditionary infor- 

 mation by Lord Webb Seymour to Sir "Walter Scott, and related 



