circumstance that Mrs. Austen's only brother, Mr. Leigh Perrot, spent
part of every year there. The name of Perrot, together with a small
estate at Northleigh in Oxfordshire, had been bequeathed to him by a
great uncle. I must devote a few sentences to this very old and now
extinct branch of the Perrot family; for one of the last survivors, Jane
Perrot, married to a Walker, was Jane Austen's great grandmother, from
whom she derived her Christian name. The Perrots were settled in
Pembrokeshire at least as early as the thirteenth century. They were
probably some of the settlers whom the policy of our Plantagenet kings
placed in that county, which thence acquired the name of 'England beyond
Wales,' for the double purpose of keeping open a communication with
Ireland from Milford Haven, and of overawing the Welsh. One of the
family seems to have carried out this latter purpose very vigorously; for
it is recorded of him that he slew _twenty-six men_ of Kemaes, a district
of Wales, and _one wolf_. The manner in which the two kinds of game are
classed together, and the disproportion of numbers, are remarkable; but
probably at that time the wolves had been so closely killed down, that
_lupicide_ was become a more rare and distinguished exploit than
_homicide_. The last of this family died about 1778, and their property
was divided between Leighs and Musgraves, the larger portion going to the
latter. Mr. Leigh Perrot pulled down the mansion, and sold the estate to
the Duke of Marlborough, and the name of these Perrots is now to be found
only on some monuments in the church of Northleigh.

Mr. Leigh Perrot was also one of several cousins to whom a life interest
in the Stoneleigh property in Warwickshire was left, after the extinction
of the earlier Leigh peerage, but he compromised his claim to the
succession in his lifetime. He married a niece of Sir Montague Cholmeley
of Lincolnshire. He was a man of considerable natural power, with much
of the wit of his uncle, the Master of Balliol, and wrote clever epigrams