"I write this from Windsor Forest, which I am come to take my last look and leave of. We have bid our Papist neighbours adieu, much as those who go to be hanged do their fellow-prisoners who are condemned to follow them a few weeks after. I was at Whiteknights, where I found the young ladies I just now mentioned [Theresa and Martha Blount] spoken of a little more coldly than I could at this time especially[7] have wished. I parted from honest Mr. Dancastle with tenderness, and from Sir William Trumbull as from a venerable prophet, foretelling with lifted hands the miseries to come upon posterity which he was just going to be removed from."
Sir William died in the December following in his 78th year, leaving an only son, also William Trumbull, barely eight years old. The subsequent history of Binfield and Easthampstead does not fall within the limits of this chapter. It must suffice to say that Pope occasionally visited the Dancastles, and possibly stayed with Lady Judith Trumbull. At all events he recommended his friend, Elijah Fenton, the poet, to be her son's tutor, and frequently corresponded with him at Easthampstead. Fenton continued to reside there even after young Trumbull grew to man's estate, and when Fenton died in 1730, Pope wrote the epitaph which is still to be seen inscribed upon the tablet erected by William Trumbull to his memory, on the north wall of Easthampstead Church.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] This was the case until quite recently; but towards the end of 1893, the late Mr. Hutchinson Browne, of Moor Close, Binfield, caused the words, "Here Pope Sung," to be once more cut in the bark of a tree growing on the site as Pope's wood. And underneath them he affixed a brass plate inscribed with the following elegant copy of verses in Latin and English, which I was fortunate in obtaining for him from the pen of the Rev. Charles Stanwell, Vicar of Ipsden, Oxon:—
"Angliacis resonare modis qui suasit Homerum
Hic cecinit laudes, Vindelisora, tuas;
Hinc Silvae nomen vates dedit; arboris olim
Inciso testis cortice truncus evat.
Silva diu periit, sed nomen et umbra supersunt.
Umbra viri circum, nomen ubique volat."
"He to our Lyre who wooed great Homer's strain,
Here sang the praise of Windsor's sylvan reign;
Hence gained the wood a poet's name; of old
The attesting trunk, inscribed, the story told.
The wood hath perished, but surviving still
His shade these haunts, his name the world doth fill."—C.W. P.
[7] Mrs. Blount and her two daughters were on the point of quitting Mapledurham in consequence of the marriage of her son, Michael Blount, in 1715.
Berkshire Words and Phrases.