Page:Archaeologia Volume 13.djvu/188

142 them among our Saxon ancestors; but he was confident that they were in use on ordinary occasions before the middle of the twelfth century, from his having discovered on a mantle-tree in the parlour of the rectory-house of Helmdon in Northamptonshire, the year 1133 manifestly carved. This being repeatedly averred by so eminent a professor on his own view, and he having presented to the Royal Society, by way of illustration, what he called an accurate drawing of the chimney taken by his own direction, it cannot be matter of surprise that a professor of a foreign university should have readily acceded to it, nor that other men of learning should have implicitly adopted it. And as in the two editions of Chambers's Dictionary, and in the Cyclopædia Britannica, there is not any demur to the evidence produced, it may have been generally considered as authentic and decisive.

There have been, however, a few persons to whom the notion has appeared questionable; and the first and principal objector, as it is believed, was Dr. Ward, who laboured to shew, that the figure supposed by Dr. Wallis to be 1 was really 2, which would occasion an alteration to 1233. And since I expressed my doubts upon these two readings in my letter to Mr. Gough, he has transmitted to me some detached pages of Bibliotheca Literaria, No X. in which periodical paper there is addressed to the editor by an anonymous correspondent the underwritten paragraph, p. 35.

"The Colchester inscription, as you print, stands thus 1090; falsified with a vengeance, for I have seen it, and it was originally thus 1890; i.e. 1490; some fantastical knave, perhaps as late as the era of quakers, has diminished the 8 of his lower parts, and left it thus 0, for it plainly appears to any discerning eye that the first 0 of the pretended 1090 is but half as big as the other. Being sure in the Colchester inscription, I shall venture a fling at the chimney (at Helmdon), which though I never saw, I have vehemently sus-