Page:White - The natural history of Selborne, and the naturalist's calendar, 1879.djvu/398

376 providentially the vast fragment, which these thoughtless little engineers endeavoured to sap, did not give way so soon as might have been expected; but it fell the night following, and with such violence that it shook the very ground, and, awakening the inhabitants of the neighbouring cottages, made them start up in their beds as if they had felt an earthquake. The motive for this dangerous attempt does not so readily appear; perhaps the more danger the more honour thought the boys, and the notion of doing some mischief gave a zest to the enterprise. As Dryden says upon another occasion—

Had the Priory been only levelled to the surface of the ground, the discerning eye of an antiquary might have ascertained its ichnography, and some judicious hand might have developed its dimensions. But besides other ravages, the very foundations have been torn up for the repair of the highways; so that the site of this convent is now become a rough, rugged pasture-field, full of hillocks and pits, choked with nettles and dwarf-elder, and trampled by the feet of the ox and the heifer.

As the tenant at the priory was lately digging among the foundations for materials to mend the highways, his labourers discovered two large stones, with which the farmer was so pleased that he ordered them to be taken out whole. One of these proved to be a large Doric capital, worked in good taste; and the other a base of a pillar, both formed out of the soft freestone of this district. These ornaments, from their dimensions, seemed to have belonged to massive columns, and show that the church of this convent was a large and costly edifice. They were found in the space which has always been supposed to have contained the south transept of the priory church. Some fragments of large pilasters were also found at the same time. The diameter of the capital was two feet three inches and a half; and of the column, where it had stood on the base, eighteen inches and three-quarters.

Two years ago, some labourers, digging again among the ruins sounded a sort of rude thick vase or urn of soft stone, containing about two gallons in measure, on the verge of the brook, in the