And here I cannot omit relating the ensuing story, confirmed by Sir
Thomas Barton, Sir Arnold Braeme, the Dean of Canterbury, with many
more gentlemen and persons of this town.

There lives not far from Canterbury a gentleman, called Colonel
Colepeper,[Footnote: Lady Barbara, daughter of Robert Sydney, Earl of
Leicester, and widow of Thomas, first Viscount Strangford, married
secondly Sir Thomas Colepeper, by whom she had Colonel Colepeper, and
a daughter, Roberta Anna, who married Major Thomas Porter, and died
issueless, June 16th, 1661, more than two years before Lady Fanshawe
was told this story, the circumstances of which she states to have
happened only three months previously. The Colonel was a most
extraordinary character, and though a man of genius and erudition, was
very nearly a madman. A voluminous collection of his MSS. is preserved
in the British Museum, whence it appears that he was in the habit of
committing his most private thoughts to paper; that there was scarcely
a subject to which his attention was not directed; and that the
Government and eminent persons were continually tormented with his
projects and discoveries, embracing among others the Longitude. His
quarrel with the Earl of Devonshire, which led to the imposition upon
that nobleman of the exorbitant fine of, L30,000, is well known. But
he was always involved in disputes and law-suits, and not unfrequently
he was a prisoner for debt. He filed affidavits in Chancery, denying
his sister's marriage, with the view of justifying his refusal to pay
her portion to her husband; but the only thing which in any way bears
on the anecdote of the vault, is the fact that one of the Colonel's
conceits was a plan for embalming dead bodies. The horrible suspicion
alluded to by Lady Fanshawe is unsupported by any other statement, and
it may be hoped that she was as misinformed on the subject as she was
about the time of Mrs. Porter's decease. Part of Colonel Colepeper's