Page:Two Sussex archaeologists, William Durrant Cooper and Mark Antony Lower.djvu/38

 the property and home of, whose name is held in reverence as that of the Father of Sussex Archæology. Such a domicile became, therefore, the appropriate abiding-place of so eminent a student of past times as Mark Antony Lower. The house has now disappeared, and on its site a modern, and doubtless much more convenient, residence rears its head, but the old Saint Anne's house was associated with times and men round which and whom the halo of Antiquity has long gathered. Mr. Lower occupied this ancient house until the year 1867. In it were written the greater part of his many papers and books, and within its walls he continued to pursue his scholastic vocation, limiting his pupils to boarders only, among whom were, generally, several young Frenchmen, for whose tuition he specially laid himself out. But, towards the latter years of his stay in Lewes, the establishment of public and semi-public schools and colleges for the sons of middle-class parents, as also the failing health of himself and his devoted wife, upon whom devolved the domestic superintendence of his modest academy, told upon the number of his inmates, and his consequent pecuniary returns, when, in the last-mentioned year, Mrs. Lower succumbed to the malady under which she had been suffering, and her husband, in the thirtieth year of his wedded life, a life which, in regard to his domestic happiness, had been all that he could have desired or anticipated, found himself a bereaved widower, at a season when he could ill spare so loved and loving a partner. To a man of his strong affections, this melancholy event was productive of considerable distress of mind, and a few months afterwards, under the altered circumstances in which he found himself placed, he sold his dear old house, broke up his school, and removed to Seaford, still taking a few French pupils.

Anxious to mark their sense, and appreciating the importance of Mr. Lower's long labours in connection with the history of his native county, his friends—members and non-members alike of the Sussex Archaeological Society—organized a committee, and raised a