rliamentary sanction and large sums of money
to found a colony of emigrant debtors in the New World, made friends
with the Creek and the Choctaw Indians, fought the Spaniards, and
planted the roots of his little settlement so firmly that he lived to
see Georgia acknowledged by the Mother Country as a sovereign
independent State.

Some years ago there was an exhibition of Old Haslemere held at the
Museum, of which Mr. Swanton very kindly gave me particulars. One of the
pictures lent by Mr. J.W. Penfold, an old, if not the oldest,
inhabitant, shows General Oglethorpe with the accompanying
note:-"General James Oglethorpe. Died 30th June, 1785, Aged 102, said to
be the oldest General in Europe. Sketched from life at the sale of Dr.
Johnson's books, February 18, 1785, where the General was reading a book
he had purchased without spectacles. In 1706 he had an Ensign Commission
in the Guards, and remember'd to have shot snipes in Conduit Mead, where
Conduit Street now stands." The compiler of the note may have been right
about the snipes, but he was wrong about the General's age, for he was
no more than 96. But the admirable caution of the phrase "said to be"
remains on record.

When Haslemere was finally deprived of its two members, the local
reformers were jubilant. One of them, in _The Burial of the Boroughs_,
printed at Petersfield in 1832, burst into verse:--

"Old Borough-bridge is broken down,
In spite of its proud pier;
And Seaford, too, is just dry'd up,
And so is Hasle-mere.

It is not strange they've damn'd Newport,
It is such cursed trash;
And where's the gourmand would complain
For kicking out Salt-ash.

Toll, toll: these Boroughs ne'er will be
By us through life forgotten;
Nor will their patrons when they lie,
Just like their Boroughs, rotten."

After the burial of the rotten boroughs came the railway, and a long
time after the railway the artists and authors. Most of them climbed
further, up to Hindhead, but Haslemere kept a few. Mrs. Allingham
painted the Haslemere fish-shop and other village scenes, though she
lived nearer Witley than Haslemere. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle played
cricket for Haslemere till he went up the hill: Dr. George Macdonald
built a house on the London road: the Whympers we have met. Tennyson's
memorial is in the church, but Tennyson's was a Sussex home, on
Blackdown.

Shottermill joins Haslemere on the west, and has had