Page:Two Sussex archaeologists, William Durrant Cooper and Mark Antony Lower.djvu/39

, in testimony of the high esteem in which they held him and his services. The fund thus raised, amounting to about £400, was presented to him some short time before his removal to Seaford.

Some three years after this removal he took for his second wife a maiden lady whom he had long known—Miss Sarah Scrase—of an old and respectable family, originally Danish, long settled in Sussex. Soon after this second marriage, namely, in 1871, he left his native county entirely, to reside in London or its immediate neighbourhood, in order to apply himself, as far as his impaired health would permit, to literary pursuits.

In 1873, a trip to Denmark and Sweden was resolved on, partly under the hope that his health would be benefited by it, and partly with the object of pursuing some inquiries, of an archaeological character, among a people so nearly allied to our own in several important particulars. His wife accompanied him. But the health-seeking pilgrimage failed of its object, and he was, after too short a sojourn for his literary purposes, ordered back to England by his physician, by the most expeditious route. A book, however, the last his hitherto active hand produced, was the outcome of his otherwise fruitless journey, and this book, Wayside Notes in Scandinavia. London, 1874, presented, it must be confessed, but a faint reflex of his usual lively style of composition.

In 1875 it was his misfortune to follow his second wife, who was affectionately attached to him, to the grave. After her death he removed from his abode in the southern suburb of London, Peckham, to the house of his youngest daughter, Mrs. Hawkins, at Enfield, Middlesex, where, surrounded by such of his six surviving sons and daughters as happened to be in England, he passed away, on the 22nd of March, 1876, in the sixty-third year of his age.

Mr. Lower took no active part in the municipal affairs of Lewes; he served as one of the Headboroughs in the year 1860-1861, but never held any other prominently public office.

It is as one of the originators of the