LINKS WITH THE PAST.
[To THE EDITOR Or THE " SPECTATOR.'] SIR,—Perhaps some of your readers may be disposed to emulate or to surpass the following enumeration of links with the past which I find interesting in my own case. My grandfather and grandmother were both born in the last decade of the reign of George II., before the battle of Plessey had begun the Empire of England in the East, or the taking of Quebec bad won Canada from France. My father was born in the early days of the French Revolution, only sixteen years after the declara- tion of American Independence. I have conversed with a man whose uncle fought at Culloden, and who had himself spoken with a man who heard Whitefield preach. Whitefield died in 1770. As a child I knew an old man who remembered the loss of the 'Royal George' in 1782.
Later in life I knew well an old lady who was taken as a child by her nurse to see a man hanging in chains, and who went as a young woman to see Sir Joseph Banks at his Lincoln- shire home to ask him to use his influence on behalf of her brother, then detained with many other British subjects in Paris by order of Napoleon. In my first curacy, 1870-72, I used to visit an old labourer who had been, he said, both at Trafalgar and Waterloo. Having deserted from the Navy he afterwards* joined the Army, and was present at the great battle ati an artillery driver. A kinsman of my mother told me that when serving in the Navy in early life he saw Napoleon on the 'Bellero- phon' in the Downs after his surrender to the British. Another kinsman of my mother, an old artillery officer, whom I well remember, fought in the Peninsular War. Many people of my age, however, seventy-five, must recollect veterans of that date. I think the most remarkable of my links with the past is the following: My great-grandfather was married for the first time in 1720, and thus, although I cannot give the exact date of his birth owing to the irregularities of Irish registere, it is safe to assume that only two lives separate me from the reign of
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