last summer. The invitation, written one day, arrived in course of post by breakfast-time the next, and without any uncomfortable hurry in packing or setting off, we were quietly dining with our kind inviters, rather before than after, our usual hour, and might have returned very conveniently the same evening, had we been so minded.

There was some temptation to this exploit besides the very great one of whisking to and fro like a jack-o'lantern, and making all the village stare at our rapidity. Our road lay through the Forest, and we might have passed again by moonlight the old romantic royal town of Windsor, with its stately palace and its Shaksperian associations-I never catch a glimpse of those antique buildings, but those Merry Wives" and all their company start up before my eyes; might have heard the night-wind rustle amongst the venerable oaks and beeches of its beautiful park; might have seen the deer couching in the fern, and the hare scudding across the glades; and as we paused to contemplate the magical effects of light and shadow which forest scenery displays at such an hour, might have seen the castle in the distance, throwing its dark masses against the sky, and looking like some stupendous work of nature, or some grand dream of Gothic architecture, rather than an actual erection of man. Every body that has seen Windsor by moonlight will understand how much one wishes to see that most striking sight again;—but our friends were not people to run away from, besides I wanted to get better acquainted with the celebrated spot where they resided :—so we staid.

"God made the Country and man made the Town!" I wonder in which of the two divisions Cowper would have placed Richmond. Every Londoner would laugh at the rustic who should call it town, and with foreigners it passes pretty generally for a sample (the only one they see) of the rural villages of England; and yet it is no more like the country, the real untrimmed genuine country, as we see it hereabouts for instance, than a garden is like a field. I do not say this in disparagement. Richmond is nature in a courtdress, but still nature, -ay, and very lovely nature too, gay and happy and elegant as one of Charles the Second's beauties, and with as little to remind one of the original penalty of labour, or poverty, or grief, or crime. I suppose that since no place on the globe is wholly exempt from their influence, care and vice may exist even there. They are, however, well hidden. The inhabitants may find them, or they may find the inhabitants, but to the casual visiter, Richmond appears as a sort of fairy land, a piece of the old Arcadia, a holidayspot for ladies and gentlemen, where they lead a happy out-of-door life, like the gay folks in Watteau's pictures, and have nothing to do with the work-a-day world.

The principal charm of this smiling landscape is the river, the beautiful river; for the hill seems to me over-rated. That celebrated prospect is, to my eye, too woody, too leafy, too green. There is a monotony of vegetation, a heaviness. The view was finer, as I first saw it in February, when the bare branches admitted frequent glimpses of houses and villages, and the colouring was left to the fancy, than when arrayed in the pomp and garniture of "the leafy month of June." Canova said it only wanted crags. I rather incline to the old American criticism, and think that it wants clearing.

But the river! the beautiful river! there is no over-rating that. Brimming to its very banks of meadow or of garden; clear, pure and calm, as the bright summer sky, which is reflected in clearer brightness from its bosom; no praise can be too enthusiastic for that glorious stream. How gracefully it glides through the graceful bridge! And how the boats become it! And how pretty those boats are, from the small skiff of the market-woman laden with fruit and flowers, or the light-green pleasure-vessel with its white awning and its gay freight of beaux and belles, to the heavy steam-boat which comes walloping along with a regular mechanical combination of noise and motion, rumpling the quiet waters, and leaving a track of waves which vary most agreeably the level lake-like surface of the tranquil river. Certainly the Thames is the pleasantest highway in his majesty's dominions.

Some of the happiest hours I ever passed in my life were spent on its bosom in one of those sweet and shady June mornings, when the light clouds seemed as it were following the sun, and enfolding him in a thousand veils of whiter alabaster, and the soft air came loaded with fragrance from gardens which were one flush of roses and honeysuckles. I shall not easily forget that morning. Gliding along through those beautiful scenes with companions worthy of their beauty; sunk in that silence of deep enjoyment, that delicious dreaminess which looks so like thought, although in reality a much wiser and happier thing; listening half unconsciously to Emily I.'s sweet Venetian ballads, the singer and her song so suited to the scene and the hour; repeating almost unconsciously as we met the Queen-birds,

The swans on fair St. Mary's lake
Float double, swan and shadow!"

just roused as we passed Pope's grotto, or the arch over Strawberry Hill; and then landing at Hampton Court, the palace of the Cartoons and of the Rape of the Lock, and coming home with my mind full of the divine Raphael and of that glorious portrait of Titian by himself, which next to the Cartoons forms the chief ornament of that regal mansion; strangely checkered and intersected as those

strange things fancy and memory are apt to be, by vivid images of the fair Belinda, and of that inimitable game at Ombre which will live longer than any painting, and can only die with the language. There is no forgetting that morning.

Another almost as pleasant was passed in going down the river towards Kew, amongst all sorts of royal recollections, from the remains of the house of Anne of Cleves, to the lime-trees fragrant with blossom and musical with bees, under which the late king and queen used to sit of a summer evening, whilst their children were playing round them on the grass. Kew Palace is in fine harmony with this pretty family scene. One likes to think of royalty so comfortable and homely and unconstrained as it must have been in that small ugly old-fashioned house. Princes are the born thralls of splendour, and to see them eased of their cumbrous magnificence produces much such a sensation of pleasure as that which one feels in reading the fine passage of Ivanhoe, where the collar is taken from the neck of Gurth, and he leaps up a free man. At Kew, too, in those confined and illfurnished rooms, the royal inhabitants were not without better luxuries; books accessible and readable, and looking as if they had been read, and a fine collection of cabinet pictures: superb Canaletti's; the famous Dropsical Woman on which the queen is said during her last illness to have fixed her eyes so frequently and with such an intense expression of self-pity; and a portrait of Vandyke, which rivals the Titian, the elegant Vandyke with his head over the shoulder, which has been so often engraved. What a noble race of men those great painters were! There is nothing in all their works grander or fuller of intellectual beauty than some of their own heads as we find them recorded in their portraits of themselves, or in the interesting col

lection of Vasari.

This remark will hardly apply to one great Painter, whose residence forms one of the many delightful associations of Richmond. Sir Joshua, who flattered all other persons, did himself so little justice, that in his own portraits he might pass for a dancing-master. His Villa is here; rich in remembrances of Johnson and Boswell and Goldsmith and Burke; here the spot where the poet Thomson used to write; here the elegant house of Owen Cambridge; close by the celebrated villa of Pope, where one seems to see again, Swift and Gay, St. John and Arbuthnot; a stone's throw off the still more celebrated gothic toy-shop Strawberry Hill, which we all know so well from the minute and vivid descriptions of its master, the most amusing of letter-writers, the most fashionable of antiquaries, the most learned of petit-maitres, the cynical finical delightful Horace Walpole; here too is Richmond Park, where Jeanie

Deans and the Duke of Argyle met Queen Caroline: it has been improved unluckily, and the walk where the interview took place no longer exists. To make some amends, however,-for every thing belonging to those delicious books assumes the form of historical interest, becomes an actual reality-to compensate for this disappointment, in removing some furniture from an old house in the Town, three portraits were discovered in the wainscot, George the second, a staring likeness, between Lady Suffolk and Queen Caroline. The paintings were the worst of that bad era, but the position of the three, and the recollection of Jeanie Deans was irresistible; those pictures ought never to be separated.

But of all the celebrated villas round Richmond, none pleased me better than one which seemed so unsuited to that gay scene, that one cannot look at it without wondering how it came there. I speak of Ham House, a stately old place retired from the river, which is concealed and divided from it by rows of huge trees.

Ham House is a perfect model of the mansion of the last century, with its dark shadowy front, its steps and terraces, its marble basins, and its deep silent court, whose iron gate, as Horace Walpole used to complain, was never opened. Every thing about it belongs to the time of hoops and periwigs. Harlow Place must have been just such an abode of stateliness and seclusion. Those iron gates seem to have been erected for no other purpose than to divide Lovelace from Clarissa; they look. so stern and so unrelenting. We almost expect to see her through them sweeping slowly along the terrace-walk in the pure dignity of her swan-like beauty, with her jealous sister watching her from a window; and we look for him, too, at the corner of the wall waiting to deposite a letter and listening with a speaking eagerness to the rustle of her silk gown. If there were any Clarissas now-a-days, they would certainly be found at Ham House. And the keeping is so perfect. The very flowers are old-fashioned. No American borders, no kalmias or azaleas or magnolias, or such heathen shrubs! No flimsy China roses! Nothing new-fangled! None but flowers of the olden time, arranged in gay formal knots, staid and prim and regular, and without a leaf awry. Add but round Dutch honeysuckles, and I dare say that Fletcher's beautiful song, which I shall borrow to conclude my description, might comprise the whole catalogue.

"Roses their sharp spines being gone,
Not royal in their smell alone,
But in their hue;
Virgin pinks of odours faint,
Daisies smell-less but most quaint,
And sweet Thyme true.
Primrose first-born child of Ver,
Merry springtime's harbinger,

This is a pleasure that seldom falls in my way. We have the ill luck to live in a very polished neighbourhood near a large manufacturing town, not far from London, and with a great road running through the village. We have a Free School of our own; and a National School, and a Lancasterian School close at hand; a public house where they take in two newspapers, and a parish clerk who reads Cobbett. In a word, we are a civilized people, I grieve to say it, a generation of wiseacres. At present we have not credulity enough amongst us to maintain a gipsy fortune-teller. My observations of this sort are all retrospective;-nothing better than recollections, dating at least twenty years back, before the lightning of universal education (for really it did burst upon us like a storm) had astonished and illuminated the world.

all times, and was in truth almost equally agreeable to look at or to listen to.

So unluckily thought Peter Hodges. Every evening through the winter, from Michaelmas to New-year's day, and from New-year's day to Candlemas, did that indefatigable suitor present himself at the mason's cottage, until Dame Butler, whose domestic economy had at first been a good deal discomposed by the honour of the young farmer's visits, began from mere habit to mind him no more than a joint stool, and till poor Kate grew so weary of the sight of him, that she used to lock herself into her own little room, and go to bed without her supper, purely to get out of his way.

Now this was an affront which our imperturbable suitor bore with exemplary patience; but for which the contumacious damsel received sundry serious reproofs from her good father, the little mason; who reminded her that not only did farmer Hodges take the trouble to walk two miles every night to look at her baby-face, but that it was not many

Now Peter was of that order of suitors with whom fathers are generally better pleased than their daughters, especially when those fathers are, as was the case with our good mason, thrifty and cautious, and mindful of the main chance, and the daughters like Kate, thoughtless and open-hearted. He, Peter Hodges, was a tall lathy awkward figure, with a boyish-I had almost said a girlish-countenance, fair, pale and freckled, and an expression so remarkably vacant and simple, that nobody could see him without being tempted to ask Macbeth's uncivil question, "Where got'st thou that goose look ?" His motion was weak and shambling; as if his long thin limbs were unable to support his long thin body. Even his straight light hair stuck up and stuck out and waved abroad with a flickering motion, like flax upon a distaff, adding tenfold to the helpless silliness of his aspect. Silly he looked, and silly he was; so silly that in conversation, as his fair mistress was wont to assert, the very magpie had the advantage of him, inasmuch as she, when a stranger said "How d'ye do, Mag?" would answer" What's that to you, sir!" whereas Peter when thus addressed only opened his mouth and stared, and said nothing.

No such accusation could be brought against Kate, a lively spirited girl, whose beauty owed half its reputation to the quickness of mind and the light and joyous temperament, which danced in her eyes, played in her smiles, and gave a singular charm to the mingled archness and innocence of her rustic merriment. Kate had plenty to say for herself at

corner of a dark winter's night. "I never saw any thing there myself," continued master Butler, but all the parish knows it's haunted, and my grandmother, rest her soul! got strangely scared there, in her younger days, by a ghost all in white, and of surprising stature. The farmer thought he saw it last night," added the man of mortar; "he came in quite flustrated like, with his hair right on end upon his head, and making as much noise with his breath as you are doing with those bellows, as if coals did not burn out fast enough, without such wastefulness," added the angry father, passing with great rapidity from one subject of objurgation to another; "the fire 's a good fire, and nobody but an extravagant hussy would think of blowing it after that fashion."

"Mother ordered me to heat the irons," replied the culprit meekly; "but did Farmer Hodges really see the ghost, father? Do you think it was the ghost? Did you see any signs of it?"

Why no," responded the little mason: "I can't say that I did. I took my hat down from the nail, and set out to see, but just at our gate I met young Joe Appleton of the Mill-I wonder what he was doing about here so late," muttered the knight of the hod, again flying from his subject and casting a keen glance at his daughter, who blushed and fidgeted, and busied herself in laying down the irons before the fire, and at last spoke timidly.

"But the ghost, father? Had he seen the ghost?"

"He? no! He said, if there's any truth in the chap, that the only thing to be seen at the Nursery corner, when he came by, was Hester Hewitt's white cow looking over a