Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/7



the information relative to the family of L. E. L. that may be requisite as introductory to a record of her life, may be gathered without recurring to a remoter period than the commencement of the eighteenth century. The Landons appear to have been at that time settled at Crednall, in Herefordshire, where they enjoyed some landed property, in the possession of which they flourished until about the period of the South Sea mania, when one of them, Sir William Landon, Knt., concluded a series of enterprises, by which the circumstances of the family had been materially advanced, with some less prosperous speculations, whose issue involved the total loss of the patrimonial estates. Of the next generation, thus left to "sink or swim," as fortune willed it, some kept afloat, and the church seems to have been their ark of safety. One of Sir William's descendants, the great-grandfather of L. E. L., abundantly repaid the succour thus afforded to him, by a zealous and devout championship of the church against "all dissenters" in that day: as is apparent from a tablet on the north wall of the chancel in the