Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/317

Rh letter to E. D. sufficiently early to account for his walking abroad in Fleet Street "last Saturday," caring only that it should not appear as a composition written in prison.

That he ever saw the marble monument is improbable, as it is almost certain that no such monument existed. He had read the tract, and pretended to have seen the stone so as to furnish a theme for an interesting letter. It is extremely unlikely that the names of witnesses to the apparition should be inscribed on the stone. Howell saw these names in the tract; he did not know who they were, but supposed them to be squires and ladies. There were no such gentry about South Tawton at the period. As to the statement made in the tract that the Bishop had commissioned the vicar of the parish to examine into the case, and that he and the parson bore testimony to its genuine character, that is as worthless as the witnessing to the ballad concerning the "Fish that appeared upon the Coast, on Wednesday the four score of April, forty thousand fathom above water. &hellip; It was thought she was a woman turned into a cold fish. The ballad is very pitiful, and as true. &hellip; Five justices' hands at it; and witnesses more than my pack will hold."

It was a common trick of ballad-mongers and pamphleteers to add a string of names of witnesses all fictitious, every one.

The monument is probably as fictitious as the names of the witnesses. There is not, and there never was, such in South Tawton Church any more than in that of Zeal Monachorum. Lysons gives the Oxenham monuments as he found them there: William Oxenham, gent., 1699; William Oxenham, Esq., 1743; George Oxenham, Esq., 1779. "It is proper to add," says Lysons, "that there is no trace of the Oxenham family,