inspirer of The Rape of the Lock was John Caryll, the nephew. His intimacy and correspondence with Pope lasted from 1710 till his (Caryll's) death in 1736. His grandmother had been a daughter of the second Lord Petre, so that he was a second cousin to The Baron' of the poem.

3. Robert, seventh Lord Petre (The Baron), was about a year younger than Pope, having been born in the early part of 1689. He had succeeded his father in the title some three years before he was guilty of the Rape of Miss Fermor's Lock, and was at the time a young man of twenty-two. He married Miss Catharine Walmesley in the following March, before the publication of the first version of the poem, and died in the next year of small-pox.

4. We now come to the central figure of the story, Miss Arabella Fermor (Belinda).

Sir Richard Fermor of Somerton in Oxfordshire had died in 1642, leaving eight children. It is only with two of these that we are concerned: firstly, his daughter Lucy, who married William, the second surviving son of the second Lord Petre, and a brother of the Lady Catharine Petre who had married John Caryll's grandfather, so that she was a greataunt to Robert, the seventh Lord Petre (The Baron), as well as Caryll's grandmother; secondly, his son Henry, who was the grandfather of Mr. Henry Fermor of Tusmore and Somerton, the father of Arabella. The last-named Henry Fermor married Hellen ',1 the second daughter of Sir George Browne of Wickham Breux in Kent. They had nine children: two sons, James and Henry, and seven daughters,

1 So called in her husband's will, and also on the monument at Somerton, where she was buried in 1741.

The Baronetage mentions her as the daughter of Sir George Browne of Caversham, K.B. This is the same family; but Sir George was not a Baronet. It was his brother John who was created a Baronet in 1665.

of whom Arabella was the eldest.

Her age in 1711 cannot

with certainty be fixed, but it was probably about nineteen or twenty. The evidence of this is as follows: 2

In April, 1700, Henry Fermor (Arabella's father) charged the family property with portions for his daughters, Arabella's portion being three times as large as those of her younger sisters. These portions were to become payable at the age of twenty-one or earlier marriage, and in the meantime 'maintenance' was to be paid for each daughter of £30 per annum until they should respectively reach the age of thirteen, and of £50 per annum afterwards.

1 Mr. Courthope in his Life of Pope (1889) says that she was the fourth child of Henry, the proprietor of the place, and of Alice (sic) his wife'. This is, I think, a mistake: and perhaps is to be accounted for by the fact that she is shown as the fourth child in the Fermor pedigree, printed in the Genealogical Collections illustrating the History of Roman Catholic Families of England. Based on the Lawson manuscript. Part I, edited by J. Jackson Howard and H. Farnham Burke. Printed for Private circulation only, 1887. There are other mistakes in this pedigree, of which there are two copies in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, one of them being entitled as above, and the other having no title-page, but acquired by the Library in 1880.

N.B. If the order of the daughters given in the Howard and Burke' pedigree is right, Arabella could not have been more than fifteen, if so much, at the time when the outrage was committed; and at that age she would not have been styled Mrs. (Mistress), nor is she likely to have been an acknowledged beauty'.

In the year 1856, Sir Charles Robert Tempest petitioned the House of Lords for the determination in his favour of the abeyance into which the Barony of de Scales had fallen at the end of the fifteenth century, claiming to prove that he had vested in him one 72nd part of one moiety of the said Barony! Mr. Chester Waters in his Chesters of Chicheley shows that the descent of one moiety is wholly misrepresented in the minutes of evidence printed for this claim (see Cokayne's Peerage, s.v. de Scales), which was rejected by the House of Lords in 1856. But, however untrustworthy in matters of pedigree the de Scales evidence may be, there were many deeds, connected with the Fermor family, produced by the late Mr. Clement Uvedale Price, the family lawyer, and these were set out at length in the evidence, and speak for themselves. It is on the contents of some of these deeds that the statements in the text are founded.

The daughters mentioned in this deed are in the following order: Arabella, Winifred, Mary Ursula, Anne, Henrietta, and Hellen (Elizabeth was not born then; a similar provision was made for her by a later deed dated in 1702).

Henry Fermor's eldest son, James, married Miss Mary Throckmorton in 1713, and one of the deeds connected with the settlement made upon his marriage describes Arabella as the eldest sister of the said James Fermor'; furthermore, she alone of all the sisters is a 'party' to this deed, which bears date July 11, 1713. This deed fully 'recites' the 'portion-deed' of 1700, mentioned above, and goes on to state that Arabella's portion thereunder had become payable '. It would seem, therefore, to be clear that (1) Arabella was not yet thirteen years old in 1700, and (2) that she was twenty-one years old in 1713. This means that she was born between the years 1687 and 1692. There is no evidence forthcoming to fix the date of her birth more closely, but the probabilities would seem to be that one at least of her two brothers was older than she (they are both of them' parties' to the deed of 1713), and the later date is perhaps the most likely. The order in which the daughters are named varies somewhat in the two deeds, and in that of 1713 Henrietta is called Herriott, but Arabella heads the list in both.

This would seem to be a convenient place for enumerating the nine children of Henry Fermor and Hellen his wife; they were as follows:

1. James, the eldest son, who married Miss Throckmorton in 1713.

2. Henry, the younger son, who married Miss Wightwick of Banbury, and died in 1736.

3. Arabella, who married Francis Perkins of Ufton Court, and with whom we are now concerned.

4. Winifred, a nun, became abbess at Dunkirk; name in religion, Frances.

5. Mary Ursula, a nun; name in religion, Placida.

6. Anne, who married John Sutton of Jamaica, and died

in 1749.

7. Henrietta, who died unmarried in 1744, æt. 49. 8. Hellen, who died an infant prior to 1713.

9. Elizabeth, a nun, born in 1702.

With regard to the last-named, Elizabeth, the 'Howard and Burke' pedigree states that she was born in 1702, and that is the year in which the deed providing for her portion is dated. It is somewhat strange that her act of profession', which bears date November 21, 1716, should state that she was then 'ætatis anno 18'. This would make the year of her birth 1698, which could not have been the case, for the deed of 1713 states distinctly that she was born' since the making of the said recited Indenture' of 1700.

Whether Mr. Courthope's words that both Arabella Fermor and Lord Petre were prominent members in Roman Catholic Society' are accurate is open to doubt, but that she was an acknowledged beauty' at a comparatively early age is borne out by Miss Mitford's words in The Ladies' Companion for August 10, 1850. Speaking of Ufton Court, she says:

'Fifty years ago a Catholic priest was the sole inhabitant of this interesting mansion. His friend, the late Mrs. Lenoir, Christopher Smart's daughter, . . . wrote some verses to the great oak. Her nieces, whom I am proud to call my friends, possess many reliques of that lovely Arabella Fermor, of whom Pope, in the charming dedication to the most charming of his poems, said that "the character of Belinda... resembled her in nothing but beauty". Among these reliques are her rosary, and a portrait, taken when she was twelve or thirteen

D

years of age. The face is most interesting: a high, broad forehead; dark eyes, richly fringed and deeply set ; a straight nose, pouting lips, and a short chin finely rounded. The dress is dark and graceful, with a little white turned back about the neck, and the loose sleeves. Altogether, I never saw a more charming girlish portrait, with so much of present beauty, and so true a promise of more; of that order, too, high and intellectual, which great poets love. Her last surviving son died childless in 1769, and the estate passed into another family.'

This portrait, which was exhibited at the Pope Commemoration at Twickenham in 1888, is reproduced in Miss Sharp's History of Ufton Court (4°: London, 1892), where it is stated to be then in the possession of Mr. W. W. Cowslade, of Earley, near Reading. Miss Sharp also gives two other portraits of Arabella; one, which is said to be the next in point of date, belonging to her descendant (collateral, doubtless, as none of her sons had issue), Colonel Sir Ivor Herbert, Bt., of Llanarth, who also has the companion portrait of her husband'. These two pictures were probably painted soon after her marriage. She is depicted as young and very charming; two long curling locks resting on her shoulders, and round her neck the cross' which Jews might kiss and infidels adore'. The third portrait given in Miss Sharp's book, belonged, she says, to 'Mrs. Welby-Parry, having formed part of the collection of the late Mr. Hartley of Bucklebury. It is said to be by Sir Godfrey Kneller, and its artistic merits quite bear out the supposition. It is of a woman in the prime of her beauty and grace; the pose is very elegant, and the colour charming; in it she still wears the fashionable love-lock of the day. All three portraits have much individuality and many points of resemblance.