eceive their temper during generations; but the very plot of our life's
story unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography of the
man is only an episode in the epic of the family. From this point of
view I ask the reader's leave to begin this notice of a remarkable man
who was my friend, with the accession of his great-grandfather, John
Jenkin.

This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
"Westward Ho!" was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long
enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended
in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York. John's mother had
married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication was to
be added by the Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner,
Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's
wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex
families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name the family
was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example
of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
fruits of the neighbourhood; and, like all the family, very choice in
horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle-horse, Captain
(for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family chronicle
which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop a