part of its liberties absorbed in a name of yesterday. The difficulty has arisen entirely from allowing the Postmaster-General in his wish to accommodate the St. Leonards memorialists with a post-office of their own to give the new town a part of ours to equalise the districts. But no postmaster nor race of new shopkeepers ought to be allowed lightly to rob us of a name existing before they were born. Yours, &c. Civic, Hastings, Dec 16, 1857"
If "Civic" was in Hastings as he said, when the first-stone of St. Leonards was laid, his letter shows him to have paid but little attention to the facts of history. In the first place it was not the reputation of Hastings as a watering place that caused Mr. Burton to build St. Leonards in its immediate neighborhood(sic). That gentleman, as an eminent architect, of London, dreamt, nor perhaps, unnaturally, of the design of a new town, but without conception where it was to be placed, and was afterwards engaged a considerable time in going about to find a site agreeably with his vision. He had almost fixed on Ecclesbourne when the St. Leonards Vale appeared to answer the conditions of his dream and as the most eligible spot on which to carry out his design. It is a curious psychological fact - as I can personally attest - that busy minds sometimes dream projects or inventions of superior character to others which which they can intellectually grasp in their wakeful hours. It might have been so with Mr. Burton. But, in any sense, when he fixed upon the site, he immediately entered into negotiations for that portion of the Eversfield Estate, which, although in the borough of Hastings was no more a part of the town of Hastings than were the other pars of the borough situated at Pevensey and Winchelsea in Sussex, and Beakesbourne and Grange in Kent. The town of Hastings, as "Civic" ought to have known, extended no further westward than the Priory Bridge, and it was not necessary for Mr. Burton to ask permission of the Hastings authorities for anything in connection with the building or name of the new town. Nor could the same liberty be in any way denied to those people who purchased ground from the same estate and erected property immediately contiguous to Mr. Burton's boundary. The was nothing to prevent their calling their property by what name they thought it was proper to adopt; and that name was St. Leonards. That was done by mutual consent, independently of the postal arrangements. Then, in reference to the denial of Civic that St. Leonards had been the making of Hastings, and his assertion that there had been a reciprocity of benefits; also that Hastings gave to St. Leonards its birth and early prosperity; and that anything to the contrary was "emphatically fudge", the compiler of this History has already shown in the earlier chapter the various ways in which Hastings -
