cries for help. When the chase was over, his hound missing his master, tracked him to the edge of the precipice, where he stood howling over him. The cardinal, perceiving something was wrong by the manner of the dog, hastened with his attendants to the spot, and had his kinsman relieved by causing one of the company to be let down by ropes in a basket; and the nearly exhausted Gerald was thus brought out of the pit to the surface. He remained abroad till the death of King Henry, when he returned to London.

It was at a masque or ball in the time of Edward VI. that Gerald met with Mabel Browne; and as he was one of the handsomest men of the age, and she a very beautiful young woman, it is not surprising that they fell at once in love with each other. His marriage with Mabel, the daughter of his king's honoured servant and former guardian, Sir Anthony Browne, brought him into especial favour with the young monarch, who not only made him a Knight of the Garter, but honoured him with the knighthood in 1552, restoring to him all his forfeited estates in Ireland. In the time of Queen Mary, Cardinal Pole returing to England, our knight was fully restored to his titles of Earl of Kildare and Baron Offaly; and with an almost uninterrupted good fortune, the Earl of Kildare and his Countess Mabel lived for many years, to prove the rule true by being an exception to it, that the course of true love never did run smooth.' died November 16, 1555; and his widow, 'a lady of great worth and virtue, at her fair home of Maynooth,' died

He

August 10, 1610, being the mother of three sons and two daughters.

From this chequered story we pass to a circumstance related of the same family which bears out the curious reasoning upon which Sir Henry Spelman wrote in his History of Sacrilege in the year 1632,-namely, that all those families who took or had church property presented to them, came, either in their own persons or those of their ancestors, to sorrow and misfortune.'

One of the many curious occurrences relating to Sir Anthony Browne was sent some years since to Notes and Queries, being communicated in a letter to the Editor of that periodical by a clergyman of Easebourne, near to the famous Cowdray Castle, the principal seat of the Montagues. It stated, that at the great festival given in the magnificent hall of the monks at Battle Abbey, on Sir Anthony Browne taking possession of his sovereign's munificent gift of that estate, a venerable monk stalked up the hall to the dais, where the worthy knight sat, and in prophetic language denounced him and his posterity for the crime of usurping the possessions of the church, predicting their destruction by fire and water, which fate was eventually fulfilled. The last viscount but one, just before the termination of the eighteenth century (1793), was drowned in an unsuccessful attempt to pass the Falls of Schaffhausen on the Rhine, accompanied by Mr. Sedley Burdett, the elder brother of the late distinguished Sir Francis. They had engaged an open boat to take them through the rapids, and

had appointed six o'clock on the following morning to make their voyage; but the fact coming to the knowledge of the authorities, they took measures to prevent so very dangerous an enterprise. They resolved, however, to carry out their project, regardless of all its perils; and in this spirit they decided on starting two hours earlier than the time previously fixed, namely at four o'clock in the morning instead of at six, the season of the year being early summer. They commenced their descent accordingly, and successfully passed the first or upper fall; but unhappily the same good fortune did not continue to attend them, as the boat was swamped and sunk in passing the lower fall, and was supposed to have been jammed in a cleft of the submerged rock, as neither boat nor adventurers ever again appeared. In the same week as that in which this calamity occurred, the ancient seat of the family, Cowdray Castle, was destroyed by fire, and its venerable ruins still stand at Easebourne-the significant monument, at once of the fulfilment of the old monk's prophecy, and of the extinction of the race of the great and powerful noble.

The last inheritor of the title-the immediate successor and cousin of the ill-fated young nobleman of Schaffhausen, Anthony Browne, the last Viscount Montague, who died at the opening of this century-left no male issue; but his estates, so far as he could alienate them from the title, devolved on his only daughter, who intermarried with Mr. Stephen Poyntz, a great Buckinghamshire landholder and a member of the Legislature, who, from his local importance,

was desirous of obtaining a grant of the dormant title Viscount Montague' in favour of the elder of his two sons, issue of this marriage; he was a very large contributor to the then 'Loyalty Loan,' and through his family connections, he was sanguine of success. His hopes, however, were suddenly and painfully destroyed by the deaths of the two boys, his only male issue, who were drowned together while bathing at Bognor, in the seventeenth and nineteenth years of their respective ages; the fatal 'water' thus becoming again the means in fulfilment, as it were, of the monk's terrible denunciation on the family in his fearful curse! As if, too, Time had identified himself with the fate involving their doom, the most indefatigable efforts of those who have considered themselves collaterals have been frustrated in their attempts to draw evidence from the 'shadowy past;' for although they have been most energetic tomb-searchers,' yet they have now nearly abandoned their efforts to lift successfully the shroud that Time has cast' over the scattered records of their ill-fated race.

The obscurity of the present gradually darkens as years roll on; and the proofs which now 'demonstrate thinly,' decline to their extinction, and appear to be verifying the doom which the monk of old foreshadowed; for this once proud family of other days is rapidly becoming altogether lost in the mists of obscurity. It once occupied the highest position in the land; whereas its honours are now only remembered in the ruins of its ancestral houses, leaving it for the wandering antiquary to bring them once more to light,

by the tower and the tomb to read a few records of their former greatness, and in the melancholy yet truthful strains of the poet to exclaim :

'Out upon Time! who for ever will leave

But enough of the past for the future to grieve.
Out upon Time! who will leave no more

Of the things to come than the things before.
Two or three columns and many a stone,

Ivy and moss with grass o'ergrown;

Remnants of things that have passed away,

Fragments of stone raised by creatures of clay!'

It may be interesting to add, that the name of Browne is not derived, as believed, from the colour brown, but boasts of a much higher origin: it is now well understood to be taken from the name of an office or position of dignity allied to chieftainship, which in a Scandinavian form. is known as "brân," or bren," and which was, with the numerous tribes of the north-west of Europe, the title of the chieftain or head of the clan. From this may possibly have come the French Brun, from which we get easily enough Brown and Browne.

The family of Browne was no doubt derived from the Normans; for on the Roll of Battle Abbey, amongst others, occurs the name of Browne. On Stow's "auncient Role," which he received from "Master Thomas Scriven," as containing the surnames of the "chefe noblemen and gentlemen which came into England with William the Conqueror," the name does not appear, although that of Montague occurs on both lists or rolls. The original Roll is said to