LONGEVITY.
[To THE Enema or THE “SeECTATOR..1 Snt,—Mr. Moreton Frewen in his interesting letter in your last number is only wrong in one particular,—the old man referred to can hardly have seen Oliver Cromwell. I can, however, from notes made by me many years ago, supplement Mr. Frewen's letter by giving the facts of the case to which be alludes. Shortly, those are as follows. William Horrocks, who was born in 1657, married on Christmas Day, 1682, for his first wife Elizabeth Orrell, and there were issue of that marriage four children:. Mary, born September 15th, 1683; John, January. 18th, 1686 ; Ann, March 14th, 1699 ; and William, June 9th, 1700. It is needless, even if I were able, to state more about those children, but their mother, Elizabeth, died on April 7th, 1739, and their father, William Horrocks, married again in 1743 Elizabeth, whose surname does not appear in my notes, but whose age is stated to have been at that time twenty-eight, her husband's being eighty-six. To them on March 25th, 1744, a son James was born, who lived until September 1st, 1844. The father, William, died in 1755 in his ninety-eighth year; the son, James, in his hundred and first. Such are the bare facts. The evidence for them is in the parish registers at Bradshaw, near Bolton, in Lancashire, and there also were to be seen up to the years 1843-44 like- nesses of the bridegroom of eighty-six and the bride of twenty- eight, and there also, in the latteryear, their son in his hundredth year "bad his head taken in oils" by Mr. Duval, an artist of some reputation in Manchester. For that picture my note sass that the Rev. Richard Parkinson, D.D., Canon of the Collegiate Church, Manchester, and another gentleman, paid, both, with Mr. James Crossby, a well-known lawyer of repute, and president of the Chetham Society, Manchester, haying satisfied themselves of the genuineness of the certificates and of the entries in a family Bible. The publication of Canon Parkinson's " Old Church Clock" in 1843 made the facts notorious, and numerous visits were paid during the next year to the old man of a hundred years. Amongst the visitors were the then Earl of Derby and John Bright. My notes further record that James Horroeks when ninety-one years old walked twenty-one miles in one day to record his vote as a freeholder for the county. It will have been noticed, no doubt, from these notes that as the father was born in 1667 he could hardly have seen Cromwell, but his life and his son's extended from within Cromwell's protectorship through the reigns of nine Sovereigns and into that of Victoria. I myself, though I was born in the reign of George IV., was after all but a boy in 1843, and did not then appreciate the interest to be had then and in the future from a visit to an old man of a hundred, but I have a lively impression of the facts, and can only regret now my own negligence at the time. My present age, however, seems like another link with . the past.—I am,
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