[Fuller's amusing account of Dame Hester Temple will be found in his _Worthies of Buckinghamshire_, vol. i. p. 210. edit. 1840. He says: "Dame Hester Temple, daughter to Miles Sands, Esq., was born at Latmos in this county, and was married to Sir Thomas Temple, of Stow, Baronet. She had four sons and nine daughters, which lived to be married, and so exceedingly multiplied, that this lady saw seven hundred extracted from her body. Reader, I speak within compass, and have left myself a reserve, having bought the truth hereof by a wager I lost. Besides, there was a new generation of marriageable females just at her death; so that this aged vine may be said to wither, even when it had many young boughs ready to knit. "Had I been one of her relations, and as well enabled as most of them be, I would have erected a monument for her--thus designed. A fair tree should have been erected, the said lady and her husband lying at the bottom or root thereof; the heir of the family should have ascended both the middle and top bough thereof. On the right hand hereof her younger sons, {469} on the left her daughters, should, as so many boughs, be spread forth. Her grandchildren should have their names inscribed on the branches of those boughs; the great-grandchildren on the twigs of those branches; and the great-great-grandchildren on the leaves of those twigs. Such as survived her death should be done in a lively green, the rest (as blasted) in a pale and yellow fading colour. "Pliny, lib. vii. cap. 13. (who reports it as a wonder worthy the chronicle, that Chrispinus Hilarus, _prælatâ pompâ_, 'with open ostentation,' sacrificed in the capitol seventy-four of his children and children's children attending on him,) would more admire, if admitted to this spectacle. "Vives telleth us of village in Spain, of about an hundred houses, whereof all the inhabitants were issued from one certain old man who lived, when as that village was so peopled, so as the name of propinquity, how the youngest of the children should call him, could not be given.[1] 'Lingua enim nostra supra abavum non ascendit;' ('Our language,' saith he, meaning the Spanish, 'affords not a name above the great-grandfather's father'). But, had the offspring of this lady been contracted into one place, they were enough to have peopled a city of a competent proportion though her issue was not so long in succession, as broad in extent. "I confess very many of her descendants died before her death; in which respect she was far surpassed by a Roman matron, on which the poet thus epitapheth it, in her own person[2]: '_Viginti atque novem, genitrici Callicrateæ,_ _Nullius sexus mors mihi visa fuit._ _Sed centum et quinque explevi bene messibus annos,_ _In tremulam baculo non subeunte manum._'