MR. VERDANT GREEN'S RELATIVES AND ANTECEDENTS.

IF you will refer to the unpublished volume of "Burke's Landed
Gentry", and turn to letter G, article "GREEN," you will see that the
Verdant Greens are a family of some respectability and of
considerable antiquity. We meet with them as early as 1096, flocking
to the Crusades among the followers of Peter the Hermit, when one of
their number, Greene surnamed the Witless, mortgaged his lands in order
to supply his poorer companions with the sinews of war. The family
estate, however, appears to have been redeemed and greatly increased
by his great-grandson, Hugo de Greene, but was again jeoparded in the
year 1456, when Basil Greene, being commissioned by Henry the Sixth
to enrich his sovereign by discovering the philosopher's stone,
squandered the greater part of his fortune in unavailing experiments;
while his son, who was also infected with the spirit of the age, was
blown up in his laboratory when just on the point of discovering the
elixir of life. It seems to have been about this time that the
Greenes became connected by marriage with the equally old family of
the Verdants; and, in the year 1510, we find a Verdant Greene as
justice of the peace for the county of Warwick, presiding at the
trial of three decrepid old women, who, being found guilty of
transforming themselves into cats, and in that shape attending the
nightly assemblies of evil spirits, were very properly pronounced by
him to be witches, and were burnt with all due solemnity.

In tracing the records of the family, we do not find that any of its
members attained to great eminence in the state, either in the
counsels of the senate or the active services of the field; or that
they amassed any unusual amount of wealth or landed property. But we