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 to find any historical proof of the relationship. He clung, however, to the belief that he was descended from the great earl, although the earldom came to an end and the property was divided between heiresses in the thirteenth century, making a gap between Thomas de Quincey's earliest known ancestor and the last earl of nearly four hundred years. The features of the statue must have been evolved from the brain of the sculptor, and the work could not have been a likeness. Mrs. Baird-Srnith survived her husband for more than forty years and died at the beginning of the twentieth century.