Chapter L: B. L

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Minor Queries with Answers.

_Dame Hester Temple._--"Lady Temple lived to see seven hundred of her own descendants: she had thirteen children." I have extracted this "sea-serpent" from an extract in Burke from _Fuller's Worthies_, but I am unable to refer to the original for confirmation of this astounding fact; if true it is wonderful.

Y. S. M.

[Fuller's amusing account of Dame Hester Temple will be found in his
_Worthies of Buckinghamshire_, vol. i. p. 210. edit. 1840. He says:
"Dame Hester Temple, daughter to Miles Sands, Esq., was born at Latmos
in this county, and was married to Sir Thomas Temple, of Stow, Baronet.
She had four sons and nine daughters, which lived to be married, and so
exceedingly multiplied, that this lady saw seven hundred extracted from
her body. Reader, I speak within compass, and have left myself a
reserve, having bought the truth hereof by a wager I lost. Besides,
there was a new generation of marriageable females just at her death;
so that this aged vine may be said to wither, even when it had many
young boughs ready to knit.

"Had I been one of her relations, and as well enabled as most of them
be, I would have erected a monument for her--thus designed. A fair tree
should have been erected, the said lady and her husband lying at the
bottom or root thereof; the heir of the family should have ascended
both the middle and top bough thereof. On the right hand hereof her
younger sons, {469} on the left her daughters, should, as so many
boughs, be spread forth. Her grandchildren should have their names
inscribed on the branches of those boughs; the great-grandchildren on
the twigs of those branches; and the great-great-grandchildren on the
leaves of those twigs. Such as survived her death should be done in a
lively green, the rest (as blasted) in a pale and yellow fading colour.

"Pliny, lib. vii. cap. 13. (who reports it as a wonder worthy the
chronicle, that Chrispinus Hilarus, _praelata pompa_, 'with open
ostentation,' sacrificed in the capitol seventy-four of his children
and children's children attending on him,) would more admire, if
admitted to this spectacle.

"Vives telleth us of village in Spain, of about an hundred houses,
whereof all the inhabitants were issued from one certain old man who
lived, when as that village was so peopled, so as the name of
propinquity, how the youngest of the children should call him, could
not be given.[1] 'Lingua enim nostra supra abavum non ascendit;' ('Our
language,' saith he, meaning the Spanish, 'affords not a name above the
great-grandfather's father'). But, had the offspring of this lady been
contracted into one place, they were enough to have peopled a city of a
competent proportion though her issue was not so long in succession, as
broad in extent.

"I confess very many of her descendants died before her death; in which
respect she was far surpassed by a Roman matron, on which the poet thus
epitapheth it, in her own person[2]:

'_Viginti atque novem, genitrici Callicrateae,_
_Nullius sexus mors mihi visa fuit._
_Sed centum et quinque explevi bene messibus annos,_
_In tremulam baculo non subeunte manum._'

'Twenty-nine births Callicrate I told,
And of both sexes saw none sent to grave,
I was an hundred and five winters old,
Yet stay from staff my hand did never crave.'

Thus, in all ages, God bestoweth personal felicities on some far above
the proportion of others. The Lady Temple died A.D. 1656."]

[Footnote 1: In Comment upon 8th chapter of lib. xv. de Civitate Dei.]

[Footnote 2: Ausonius, Epitaph. Heroeum, num. 34.]

_Samuel White._--In Bishop Horsley's _Biblical Criticism_, he refers several times to a Samuel White, whom he speaks of in terms of contempt, and calls him, in one place, "that contemptible ape of Grotius;" and in another, "so dull a man." Query, who was this Mr. White, and what work did he publish?