In 1821 William Cobbett wrote his "Rural Rides". In one of them he discourses of a visit to Moor Park, once the seat of Sir William Temple, whose heart, enclosed in a silver box, was said to have been buried in 1698 beneath his sun-dial. But Cobbett casts a doubt upon this time-honored legend by declaring that it was beneath a garden seat that the silver box was buried. Charles Lamb, in his essay "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple", discourses lovingly of the sun-dial. "It spoke of moderate labours, of pleasures not protracted after sunset, of temperance, and good hours." The dials made out of herbs and flowers come in for a special share of his commendation. How much more the dial induces meditation than the clock, but how very much lost we should be, these bustling times, if we had to depend upon one of these delightful but irresponsible "antiques" which say to you quite distinctly, "I mark only sunny hours." [Illustration: Figure 94. TALL-CASE CLOCKS. _English._ DANIEL QUARE, _maker_. 1690. J. HARRISON, _maker_. 1715.] In an inventory of the property of William Bennett, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, who died in 1753, among other articles were mentioned "warming-pan, pewter, sun-dial, book, debts, £10." After the dial came the clepsydra, a sort of clock, which measured time by the graduated flow of some liquid, like water, through a small aperture. While the hour-glass was not known in England till 886, it had been used in Rome long before; but inventions traveled slowly in those days. The hour-glass remained long in use, even after the invention of clocks, and while we know it chiefly as marking the period of agony of some unwilling victim at the piano, it was used even later than the noon mark on the window-ledge, which may be seen to-day on some of the old houses still standing. A writer in the "Gentlemen's Magazine" for 1746 says that he was present on an occasion when a grave-digger was at work in Clerkenwell Fields. "He had dug pretty deep, and was come to a coffin which had lain so long that it was quite rotten, and the plate so eaten with rust that he could not read anything of the inscription. In clearing away the old wood the grave-digger found an hour-glass close to the left side of the skull, with sand still in it. Being a lover of antiquity, I bought it of him, and have since learned from some antiquarians that it was an ancient custom to put an hour-glass in the coffin to show that the sands of life were run." The origin of clockwork is involved in great obscurity, though there are statements by many writers that clocks were in use as early as the ninth century.