to the cause of the Young
Pretender. As he meant to join the rebel forces, the imprisonment
probably saved his own life and prevented the ruin of the family. In his
grandson's old age, when another white-haired Yorkshire squire was dining
at Walton Hall, I remember that Waterton and he reminded one another that
their grandfathers had planned to march together to Prince Charley, and
that they themselves, so differently are the rights of kings regarded at
different ages, when schoolboys together, had gone a-bird's-nesting on a
day, in 1793, set apart for mourning for the decapitation of Louis XVI.
Waterton has himself told the history of his earlier ancestors in an
autobiography which he wrote in 1837:--

"The poet tells us, that the good qualities of man and of cattle descend
to their offspring. '_Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis_.' If this
holds good, I ought to be pretty well off, as far as breeding goes; for,
on the father's side, I come in a direct line from Sir Thomas More,
through my grandmother; whilst by the mother's side I am akin to the
Bedingfelds of Oxburgh, to the Charltons of Hazelside, and to the
Swinburnes of Capheaton. My family has been at Walton Hall for some
centuries. It emigrated into Yorkshire from Waterton, in the island of
Axeholme in Lincolnshire, where it had been for a very long time.
Indeed, I dare say I could trace it up to Father Adam, if my progenitors
had only been as careful in preserving family records as the Arabs are in
recording the pedigree of their horses; for I do most firmly believe that
we are all descended from Adam and his wife Eve, notwithstanding what
certain self-sufficient philosophers may have advanced to the contrary.
Old Matt Prior had probably an opportunity of laying his hands on family
papers of the same purport as those which I have not been able to find;
for he positively informs us that Adam and Eve were his ancestors:--

'Gentlemen, here, by your leave,
Lie the bones of Matthew Prior,
A son of Adam and of Eve:
Can Bourbon or Nassau go higher?'

Depend upon it, the man under Afric's burning zone, and he from the
frozen regions of the North, have both come from the same stem. Their
difference in colour and in feature may be traced to this: viz., that the
first has had too much, and the second too little, sun.

"In remote times, some of my ancestors were sufficiently notorious to
have had their names handed down to posterity. They