IX. MARY, who died single.

The ARMS of the family are thus described: "Argent, a chevron, between
three boar's heads, erased, sable armed, or, lingued proper."

CREST. "A boar's head, as before, holding an oaken branch, vert,
fructed or."

II

DISCUSSION RESPECTING THE BIRTH-DAY OF OGLETHORPE.

There are great difficulties in ascertaining the age of Oglethorpe.
The newspapers, soon after his decease, in 1785. and the _Gentleman's_
and _London Magazine_, contain several articles about it.

While these inquiries, investigations, and statements were going the
round of all the periodicals of the day, it is unaccountably strange
that the family did not produce the desired rectification, and yet
more surprising that in the inscription on the monument erected to his
memory by his widow, and which was drawn up by her request, she should
not have furnished the writer with the date of his birth, and the
years of age to which he had arrived.

The _London Gazette_, first announcing his death, stated it _one
hundred and four years_. The _Westminster Magazine_ for July 1785,
(a periodical published in the very neighborhood of the old family
mansion,) in the monthly notice of deaths, has "June 30th, General
Oglethorpe, aged 102. He was the oldest general in England." And I
have a fine engraved portrait of him taken in February preceding his
decease, or which is inscribed "he died 30th of June, 1785, aged 102."
A writer in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for September, 1785 p. 701,
who was one of the first emigrants to Georgia, and personally and
intimately acquainted with the General, declares that "he lived to be
_near a hundred years old_, but was not _one hundred and two_, as has
been asserted."

In the Biographical Memoir of him in the 8th volume of the _European
Magazine_; in NICHOLS's _Anecdotes of Literature_ and in McCALL's
_History of Georgia_, his birth is said to have been in 1698; and yet
it is asserted by the best authorities, that he bore the military rank
of Ensign in 1710, when, according to their date of his nativity,
he could have been but _twelve years of age_; and this before his
entering College at Oxford.

Again, some make him Captain Lieutenant in the first troop of the
Queen's Guards in 1714; the same year that others put him to College.
According to such statements, he must on both these military
advancements, have been of an age quite too juvenile for military
service, and more so for military ra