Pray can you tell me any thing of some relations of my own, the Burwells?  My grandfather married Sir Jeffery Burwell’s daughter, of Rongham, in Suffolk.  Sir Jeffery’s mother, I imagine, was daughter of a Jeffery Pitman, of Suffolk; at least I know there was such a man in the latter, and that we quarter the arms of Pitman.  But I cannot find who Lady Burwell, Sir Jeffery’s wife, was.  Edmondson has searched in vain in the Heralds’ office; and I have outlived all the ancient of my family so long, that I know not of whom to Inquire, but you of the neighbourhood.  There is an old walk in the park at Houghton, called “Sir Jeffery’s Walk,” where the old gentleman used to teach my father (Sir Robert) his book.  Those very old trees encouraged my father to plant at Houghton.  When people used to try to persuade him nothing would grow there, he said, why Will not other trees grow as well as those in Sir Jeffery’s Walk?—­Other trees have grown to some purpose!  Did I ever tell you that ,my father was descended from Lord Burleigh?  The latter’s granddaughter, by his son Exeter, married Sir Giles Allington, whose daughter married Sir Robert Crane, father of Sir Edward Walpole’s .’Wife.  I want but Lady Burwell’s name to Make my genealogic tree Shoot out stems every way.  I have recovered a barony in fee, which has no defect but in being antecedent to any summons to Parliament, that of the Fitz Osberts:  and On my Mother’s side it has mounted the Lord knows whither by the Philipps,s to Henry viii. and has sucked in Dryden for a great-uncle:  and by Lady Philipps’s mother, Darcy, to Edward iii. and there I stop for brevity’s sake—­especially as Edward iii. is a second Adam; who almost is not descended from Edward 1 as posterity will be from Charles ii. and all the princes in Europe from James I. I am the first antiquary of my race.  People don’t know how entertaining a study it is.  Who begot whom is a most amusing kind of hunting; one recovers a grandfather instead of breaking one’s own neck—­and then one grows so pious to the memory of a thousand persons one never heard of before.  One finds how Christian names came into a family, with a world of other delectable erudition.  You cannot imagine how vexed I was that Bloomfield(211) died before he arrived at Houghton—­I had promised myself a whole crop of notable ancestors-but I think I have pretty well unkennelled them myself.  Adieu!  Yours ever.

P. S. I found a family of Whaplode in Lincolnshire who give our arms, and have persuaded myself that Whaplode is a corruption of Walpole, and came from a branch when we lived at Walpole in Lincolnshire.

(209) Dr. William Heberden, the distinguished physician and medical writer, who died on the 17th of March, 1801, at the advanced age of ninety-one.-E.

(210) “The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset.”  London, 1774, in two volumes, folio.  A second edition, corrected, augmented, and improved, by Richard Gough and John Bowyer Nichols, in four Volumes, folio, appeared in 1796-1815.-E.