Page:Two Sussex archaeologists, William Durrant Cooper and Mark Antony Lower.djvu/47

 could not find a human, or a humorous, side to it. His delight was to gather up, in the highways and byways, the nooks and corners, of his native county, quaint bits of character, anecdotes, and incidents of old times, such as were calculated to throw light upon the social history of past days. His humour, too, was a part of him, not an acquired faculty. The son of the author of "Tom Cladpole's Jurney to Lunnun," and "Jan Cladpole's Trip to 'Merricur, in search arter Dollar trees," he unquestionably inherited from his sire his appreciation of the oddities and eccentricities of life in every phase in which they were to be found.

But he was too honest and too earnest a student of antiquity to subordinate reality to romance. Like his old friend Cooper, he was not over-enthusiastic upon the subject of Prehistoric Archæology. The "Flint flake " and "Kitchen-midden" theories found little favour in his eyes, and, in his paper on the discovery at Newhaven of a so-called Kitchen-midden, in the eighteenth volume of the Society's Collections, his incredulity relative to the deductions of the Anthropological experts on that occasion, is, perhaps, a little too pronouncedly expressed, and he recounts a dinner-table joke, got up at their expense, with evident delight. He had not the same facility as his confrere, above-named, who was domiciled in London, had, for consulting authorities, of every kind, at the fountain head, and, sometimes, his forced reliance on second-hand sources of information may have misled him, but he shared his friend's anxiety to be correct. He lived in, and he loved, the country; and so "racy of the soil" was he, that it was difficult to induce him to sleep more than a single night in London, except under pressing and unusual circumstances.

From a graphic article, entitled, in the Temple Bar Magazine for January, 1866, the following passage will well bear transplanting to these pages:—

" has a famous Antiquary—the great authority on surnames—Mr. Mark Antony Lower. He is a gentleman with more poetry in him than most of the Dryasdust School: witness his picturesque presentment of the