By 0. E. Long, Esq. 



219 



he would "not only blast him but baffle him like a knave;" and next 

 with the Wroughton family in 1588, when Walsingham was so ready 

 to serve him: not a single syllable of insinuation do we find thrown 

 out on such tempting occasions to lead us to suppose that Darell 

 lay even under the remotest suspicion of such a crime. 



Camden too, the enquiring Camden, who was 27 years of age 

 when Mrs. Barnes made her deposition, and who subsequently 

 wrote of the matters appertaining to the County ; who speaks in 

 glowing terms of Popham, and mentions the Darells, as previously 

 connected with Littlecote, takes no notice whatever of this tale, 

 fresh, as it must have been, in the memory of men then living. If 

 Camden heard it, and in pursuing his researches he can hardly not 

 have heard it, he evidently treated it as I now venture to treat it, 

 as the got-up figment of a few persons desirous of damaging the 

 reputation of an adversary. 



Earlier in his letter (p. 46) our friend says that " every version of 

 the story " fixes the criminality on Darell, and the locality at Little- 

 cote ; but all versions trace their origin to Aubrey, and of what real 

 value is his evidence, as now exhibited, with its grain of truth in 

 its bushel of inaccuracies? Secondly, the traditional vagaries — 

 the bed-curtain — the steps — the neck-breaking stile, &c, &c, all 

 these adjuncts so hastily adopted by our Quarterly Essayist, but 

 nevertheless so summarily discarded by our " Credulous Arehaeo- 

 gist," appear, by a common consent, to be swept away, and 

 nothing is now left of this analysis, as a residuum, but Old Mistress 

 Barnes's narrative, and the insinuations of some parties, names 

 unknown, that it related to Darell and to Littlecote. Our friend 

 when writing as the annalist of his County, tells us that the story 

 " will find believers to the end of time on the faith of Walter 

 Scott's ' Rokeby ' note." On the faith of a note in a poem all fiction ! 

 It may be so, for great is the gullibility of mankind, and many 

 are the " lovers of the marvellous : " witness the follies of our 

 own day, the Bedlamite believers in spirit-rappings, and the con- 

 viction that an illiterate scullery-maid can tell us, in her pre- 

 tended trances, what our friends, in another hemisphere, are about. 

 The Historian of the "United Netherlands," in speaking of the 



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