To revert to the elder generation――Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was considered in 1802), she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude, Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The second of these was probably a place-name, though there are those who derive it from the Icelandic _frod_, wise, not from the likelier Celtic _ffrwd_, a rushing stream.[7] We find the race numerous and active, and settled chiefly about Kingston, and about Modbury, where in the year of Culloden, Richard Hurrell, gentleman, was married to Mistress Phillis[8] Collings. Their daughter, Phillis Hurrell, became the wife of Robert ffroud of Walkhampton, third son of John, to whom descended the Modbury manors of Edmerston and Gutsford; these two lived at Aveton Giffard, and are buried there in the Parish Church, where their monuments still exist. ‘Robert ffroud Armiger’ died young, four years after his marriage, which had for issue one son, and three daughters. Phillis the widow, a person of strong character, lived on for sixty-six years longer, and saw the grave opened, or opening, for nearly all her brilliant and fated grandchildren. Her babes, left fatherless in 1770, were Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth; her son Robert Hurrell was a posthumous child. The latter was to rise to more than local eminence, known throughout an exceptionally long life as Rector of Dartington, and from 1820 on, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the diocese of Exeter.[9] He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in January 1788, aged seventeen, and in due course, in 1795, proceeded Master of Arts. He came from Denbury, of which he was already Incumbent, to his new parish of Dartington, in 1799. Many children were born in Dartington Parsonage to him and to Margaret Spedding his wife, of whom Richard Hurrell Froude, named for his paternal grandfather Richard Hurrell of Modbury, was the eldest. His birth was on March 25, 1803. Certain critics who disliked the aroma, real or imaginary, of the Oxford Movement, seemed to harbour, in after years, a special grudge against Hurrell for his Marian circumstances. It was, as it were, piling offence on offence that he entered the world on the Feast of the Annunciation, and consciously, votively belonged to the College of S. Mary at Oxford. He was privately baptized at home, and with his next brother, carried up the hill to be received in the ancient Church at the Hall gates (again S. Mary’s), on the 17th of April, 1805. Hurrell seems to have been from the first a stormy sort of child, handsome, and odd, and adored by his relatives. Like the young Persians in their national prime, he learned ‘to ride, and to