Page:Two Sussex archaeologists, William Durrant Cooper and Mark Antony Lower.djvu/30

 for examination, doing his utmost to promote the financial prosperity of the Society, a friend to economy as distinct from parsimony, and ever ready with criticisms and suggestions which I felt were always entitled to respect, as they came from a cool head and a warm heart."

Any addition to the above eloquent tribute would be superfluous. All that need be added is, that this Memoir would have been much less complete, but for the valuable aid rendered by Mr. Cooper's only surviving brother, Dr. T. H. Cooper; the Rev. Geo. Proctor, D.D.; John Smith, Esq. of the Lewes Savings Bank; Frederic Ouvry, Esq. Pres. S.A.; Thomas E. Gibb, Esq. Vestry Clerk, St. Pan eras, Middlesex; J. S. Smallfield, Esq. and his old Sussex friends, G. P. Bacon, Esq. Robert Crosskey, Esq. J.P. and John Clay Lucas, Esq. F.S.A. to all of whom the heartiest thanks are here tendered.

Mr. Cooper's portrait is unavoidably absent from these pages, for the too obvious reason, that none of a satisfactory character is in existence.

MARK ANTONY LOWER. Every reader of Lockhart's Life of Sir, and of Charles Cuthbert Southey's Life of his famous father, Robert Southey, has lamented that the fragments of Autobiography which occupy the preliminary pages of those popular works break off at so early a period in the career of the two illustrious littérateurs whose lives are therein chronicled. Mark Antony Lower, a far humbler light in the literary firmament, also, to use a word which was a favourite with him, "endeavoured" a sketch of his career. The fragment which he has thus left behind him, is, alas! too brief to do more than exhibit its hero's advent upon life's threshold; but brief as it is, it is sufficiently interesting to induce a regret that its writer proceeded no further with it. Doubtless, both in the case of the eminent men above named, and in Mr. Lower's, the task of self-anatomization proved to be too painful to be persevered in. However, the outline of his life can hardly be initiated in a better way than by the presentation of his own story of its commencement:—