Welsh Journals

S68 and characteristic predilection for genealogical and topographical study led him to design and carry out the great work connected with his name, an enduring treasure of accurate, judicial, and exhaustive re¬ search, and adorned by many passages of artistic description and powerful sketches of character. Soon after leaving the University, namely, on the 2nd of August, 1808, he married, at the old Parish Church of Sandbach, Sarah, eldest daughter of John Latham, Esq.. of Bradwall Hall, in this county, and sometime President of the College of Physicians (and sister of P. Mere Latham, M.D., of Grosvenor-street, London): and it was probably about this time that he set actively in motion that splendid literary and antiquarian triumph which will for ever associate his name with our proud county palatine. A Cheshire man already, in some sense, in right of his wife, he, in 1811, allied himself still more strongly to the county by the purchase of an ancient estate at Chorlton-by-Backford, where he for many years resided, and where his third son and a daugh¬ ter were in due time born to him. Between 1809 and 1818 he was industriously labouring on his projected History, visiting personally and repeatedly every township and hamlet in the county ; arranging, consulting, and making himself full master of the charters and other evidences preserved by the leading cuunty families. Muniment chests were liberally opened to him on every hand : parochial registers, wardens' books, and family documents of the utmost value were submitted to his inspection ; pedigrees were tested and amended in the only true way, by comparison with the original records ; and years together were spent among the Cheshire MSS. at the British Museum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the Palatinate Records then preserved at Chester Castle. In the illustration of his great work he called in the aid of artists of reputation, such as Paul de Wint, Jackson, George Pickering, &c, who have given to the work a pictorial character in consonance with its standing as an historic record. But he was likewise his own illustrator, for many of the best and most valuable plates are from drawings made by his own skilled hand. A fine portrait of himself, by Jackson, forms a very appropriate frontispiece to the first volume of the History, which contains altogether one hundred and ninety-four copper and other engravings, and three hundred and fifty-seven separate cuts of armorial shields connected with the elaborate series of pedigrees scattered through the work.