THE LATE
WILLIAM DURRANT COOPER, F.S.A.,
AND THE LATE
MARK ANTONY LOWER, F.S.A.
BY HENRY CAMPKIN, F.S.A.
Within the brief space of a quarter of a year the Sussex Archæological Society has sustained a heavy loss in the death of two of its earliest, ablest, and most hard-working members. William Durrant Cooper died at his residence, 81, Guildford Street, Russell Square, London, on the 28th December, 1875; his old and intimate friend and fellow-labourer in the field of local and extra-local Archæology, Mark Antony Lower, followed him to the grave in the ensuing March, 1876, dying on the 22nd of that month; and the remains of both are laid among their kindred, in two quiet churchyards in the ancient Sussex county town, where one of them spent so many of his early years, and the other, migrating from his native village, spent the prime of his life.
The year 1812, in the very dawn of which the subject of this imperfect sketch first saw the light, was one of the most eventful, most memorable years of the nineteenth century. In that year, as is well known, "the scourge of Europe," the first Napoleon, was at last effectually checked in his career of conquest and confiscation. In England the high price of provisions and scarcity of work, and the distress and discontent consequent thereon, led to continuous local disturbances and riotings,
