Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

It was day-break; not that I could perceive the light of heaven, for the shoulders of my expiring friend impeded my view, but I inferred so from the bustle in the street below. I heard the footsteps and voices of men in the room; I could not make out the subject of their conversation, as they talked in Polish, but I remarked that they were busy about the coffin. Now, beyond a doubt, thought I, they are looking for the dead man, and my deliverance is at hand; and so it proved, although it happened after a fashion for which I was but little prepared.

One of the exploring party smote so lustily with a stout bamboo upon the extended form of the dead or dying, that he started up, and stood erect. Some of the blows lighted upon my hapless person with such effect as to make me yell out most vigorously, and take up a position directly in the rear of the defunct. This old Polish and New East Prussian method of restoring the dead to life proved, certainly, so efficacious in the present instance, that I doubt whether the impassibility of death were not preferable to the acute perceptions of the living.

I now perceived that the room was filled by men, for the most part Poles. The timely castigation had been administered by a police-officer appointed to superintend the funeral. The Tax-collector still slept the sleep of death in his coffin, which stood in the ante-chamber, whither it had been transported by the drunken Poles, who had been ordered to convey it to what had been formerly the porter's lodge. They had, however, been pleased to select my ante-chamber as a fitting resting-place for their charge, whom they confided to the watch of one of their besotted comrades, who had slumbered at his post, and, awakened probably by my entrance, had groped his way, with all the instinct of one far gone in liquor, to my bed, and there slept off the fumes of his potations.

The preceding incidents had so thoroughly unmanned me as to bring on a severe attack of fever, and for seven long weeks did I lie raving about the horrors of that fearful night; and even now, albeit, thanks to the Polish insurrection, I am no longer judge-commissary at Brczwezmcisl, I can scarce think on my adventure in New East Prussia without a shudder. However, I am always glad to relate it, as it contains a sort of moral--to wit, that we ought not to fear that which we profess to disbelieve.

ENGLAND IN 1850.

BY LAMARTINE.

When a man is strongly preoccupied with the crisis under which his country labors, every opportunity that arises is caught at to turn to the profit of his compatriots the sights with which he is struck, and the reflections with which those sights inspire him. Called by circumstances of an entirely private nature to revisit England for some time, after an absence of twenty years, it was impossible for me not to be dazzled by the immense progress made by England during that lapse of time, not only in population, in riches, industry, navigation, railroads, extent, edifices, embellishments, and the health of the capital, but also, and more especially, in charitable institutions for the people, and in associations of real religious, conservative, and fraternal socialism, between classes, to prevent explosions by the evaporation of the causes which produce them, to stifle the murmurs from below by incalculable benefits from above, and to close the mouths of the people, not by the brutalities of the police, but by the arm of public virtue. Very far from feeling afflicted or humiliated at this fine spectacle of the operation of so many really popular works, which give to England at the present moment an incontestable pre-eminence in this respect over the rest of Europe, and over us, I rejoiced at it. To asperse one's neighbor is to lower one's self. The rivalries between nations are paltry and shameful when they consist in denying or in hating the good that is done by our neighbors. These rivalries, on the contrary, are noble and fruitful when they consist in acknowledging, in glorifying, and in imitating the good which is done every where; instead of being jealousies, these rivalries become emulation. What does it signify whether a thing be English or French, provided it be a benefit? Virtues have no country, or, rather, they are of every country; it is God who inspires them, and humanity which profits by them. Let us then learn, for one, how to admire.

But I am told that these practical virtues of the English to the poorer, the _proletaire_, the suffering classes, are nothing but the prudence of selfishness! Even if that were the case, we ought still to applaud, for a selfishness so prudent and so provident, a selfishness which could do itself justice by so well imitating virtue, a selfishness which would corrupt the people by charity and prosperity--such a selfishness as that would be the most profound and most admirable of policies, it would be the Machiavelism of virtue. But it is not given to selfishness alone to transform itself so well into an appearance of charity; selfishness restricts itself, while charity diffuses itself; without doubt there is prudence in it, but there is also virtue, without doubt Old England, the veritable patrician republic under her frontispiece of monarchy, feels that the stones of her feudal edifice are becoming disjoined, and might tumble under the blast of the age, if she did not bind them together every day by the cement of her institutions in favor of her people. That is good sense, but under that good sense there is virtue; and it is impossible to remain in England for any length of time without discovering it. The source of that public virtue is the religious feeling with which that people is endowed more than many others; a divine feeling of practical religious liberty, has developed at the present moment, under a hundred forms, among them. Every one has a temple to God, where every one can recognize the light of reason, and adore that God, and serve him with his brothers in the sincerity, and in the independence of his faith. Yes, there is, if you will, at the same time, prudence, well-understood selfishness, and public virtue in the acts of England, in order to prevent a social war. Let it be whatever you like; but would that it pleased God that plebeian and proprietary France could also see and comprehend its duty to the people! Would that it pleased God that she could take a lesson from that intelligent aristocracy! Would that she could, once for all, say to herself, "I perish, I tremble, I swoon in my panics. I call at one time on the Monarchy, at another on the Republic, at another on legitimacy, now on illegitimacy--then on the Empire, now on the Inquisition--then on the police, now on the sabre, and then on eloquence to save me, and no one can save me but myself. I will save myself by my own virtue."

I have seen England twice in my life: the first time in 1822. It was the period when the Holy Alliance, recently victorious and proud of its victories over the spirit of conquest of Napoleon, struggled against the newly-born liberalism, and was only occupied in every where restoring ancient regimes and ancient ideas. The government of England, held at that time by the intelligent heirs of a great man (Mr. Pitt), was a veritable contradiction to the true nature of the country of liberty; it had taken up the cause of absolute sovereigns against the nations; it made of the free and proud citizens of England the support and soldier of the Holy Alliance; it blindly combated the revolution, with its spirit and institutions, at home and every where else. England, by no means comfortable under such a government, hardly recognized herself. She felt by instinct that she was made to play the part of the _seide_ of despotism and of the church, in place of the part of champion of independent nationalities, and of the regulated liberty of thought which Mr. Pitt had conceived for her. Thus her tribunes, her public papers, her popular meetings, her very streets and public places rang with indignation against her government and her aristocracy. The ground trembled in London under the steps of the multitudes who assembled at the slightest appeal or opportunity; the language of the people breathed anger, their physiognomies hatred of class to class; hideous poverty hung up its tatters before the doors of the most sumptuous quarters; women in a state of emaciation, hectic children, and ghastly men were to be seen wandering with a threatening carelessness about shops and warehouses laden with riches; the constables and the troops were insufficient, after the scandalous prosecution of the queen, to bridle that perpetual sedition of discontent and of hunger. The painful consciousness of a tempest hanging over Great Britain was felt in the air. A cabinet, the author and victim of that false position, sank under the effort. A statesman sought in despair a refuge against the difficulties which he saw accumulating on his country, and which he could no longer dominate but by force. I avow that I myself, at that time young and a foreigner, and not yet knowing either the solidity or the elasticity of the institutions and the manners of England, was deceived, like every body else, by these sinister symptoms of a fall, and that I prognosticated, as every body else also did, the approaching decline and fall of that great and mysterious country. The ministry of Mr. Canning placed me happily in the wrong.

I saw England again in 1830, a few months after our revolution of July. At that time the political government of England was moderate, reasonable, and wise. It endeavored, as Lord Palmerston, as Sir Robert Peel, as the Duke of Wellington have done, after the revolution of February, to prevent a collision on the Continent between the revolution and the counter-revolution. It then refused, as it refused in 1848, to be a party to an anti-French or anti-republican coalition. It proclaimed not only the right and independence of nationalities, but also the right and independence of revolutions. It thus humanely avoided irritating the revolutionists. It spared Europe the effusion of much blood. But in 1830 it was the misery of the English and Irish _proletaires_ that frightened the regards and brought consternation to the thoughts of observers. Ireland was literally dying of inanition. The manufacturing districts of the three kingdoms having produced more than the world could consume during the fifteen years of peace, left an overflow of manufactures--the masses emaciated, vitiated in body and mind, and vitiated by their hatred against the class of society who possess. The manufacturers had dismissed armies of workmen without bread. These black columns were to be seen, with their mud-colored jackets, dotting the avenues and streets of London, like columns of insects whose nests had been upset, and who blackened the soil under their steps.

The vices and brutishness of these masses of _proletaires_, degraded by ignorance and hunger--their alternate poverty and debaucheries--their promiscuousness of ages, of sexes, of dens of fetid straw, their bedding in cellars and garrets--their hideous clamors, to be met with at certain hours in the morning in certain lanes of the unclean districts of London--when those human vermin emerged into the light of the sun with howling groaning, or laughter that was really Satanic, it would have made the masses of free creatures really envy the fate of the black slaves of our colonies--masses which are abased and flogged, but, at all events loathed! It was the recruiting of the army of Marius; all that was wanting was a flag. Social war was visible there with all its horrors and its furies--every body saw it, and I myself forboded it like every body else. These symptoms struck me as such evidences of an approaching overthrow for a constitution which thus allowed its vices to stagnate and mantle, that, having some portion of my patrimony in England, I hastened to remove it, and to place it where it would be sheltered from a wreck which appeared to me to be inevitable. During this time the aristocracy and the great proprietary of England appeared insensible to these prognostics of social war, scandalized the eyes of the public by the contrast of their Asiatic luxury with these calamities, absented themselves from their properties during whole years, and were traveling from Paris to Naples and to Florence, while at the same time propagating speculative or incendiary liberalism with the liberals of the Continent. Who would not have trembled for such a country?

This time (September, 1850) I was struck, on visiting England, with an impression wholly opposed to the impressions which I have just depicted to you. I arrived in London, and I no longer recognized that capital, excepting by that immense cloud of smoke which that vast focus of English labor or leisure raises in the heavens, and by that overflowing without limit of houses, workshops, and chateaux, and agreeable residences, that a city of 2,600,000 inhabitants casts year after year beyond its walls, even to the depths of her forests, her fields, and her hills. Like a polypus with a thousand branches, London vegetates and engrafts, so to speak, on the common trunk of the city quarters on quarters, and towns upon towns. These quarters, some for labor, and others for the middle classes; some for the choice leisure of the literary classes, and others for the luxury of the aristocracy and for the splendor of the crown, not only attest the increase of that city which enlarges itself in proportion to its inhabitants, but they testify to the increase of luxury, of art, of riches, and of ease, of all which the characters are to be recognized in the disposition, in the architecture, in the ornaments, in the spaciousness, and in the comfort, sometimes splendid, sometimes modest, of the habitations of man. In the west two new towns--two towns of hotels and palaces--two towns of kings of civilization, as the Embassador of Carthage would have said--have sprung up. Toward the green and wooded heights of Hampstead--that St. Cloud of London--is a new park, including pastures, woods, waters, and gardens in its grounds, and surrounded by a circle of houses of opulent and varied architecture, each of which represents a building capital that it frightens one to calculate. Beyond this solitude inclosed in the capital other towns and suburbs have commenced, and are rapidly climbing these heights, step by step, and hillock after hillock. In these places arise chapels, churches, schools, hospitals, penitentiary prisons on new models, which take away from them their sinister aspect and significance, and which hold out moral health and correction to the guilty in place of punishment and branding. In these places are to be seen hedges of houses appropriated to all the conditions of life and fortune, but all surrounded by a court or a little garden, which affords the family rural recollections, the breathing of vegetation, and the feeling of nature present even in the very heart of the town.

This new London, which is almost rural, creeps already up these large hills, and spreads itself, from season to season, in the fields which environ them, to go by lower, more active, and more smoky suburbs, to rejoin, as far as the eye can see, the Thames, beyond which the same phenomenon is reproduced on the hills and in the plains on the other side. In surveying this the eye loses itself as if on the waves of the ocean. On every side the horizon is too narrow to embrace that town, and the town continues beyond the horizon; but every where also the sky, the air, the country, the verdure, the waters, the tops of the oaks, are mixed with that vegetation of stones, of marble, and of bricks, and appears to make of new London, not an arid and dead city, but a fertile and living province, which germinates at the same time with men and trees, with habitations and fields; a city of which the nature has not been changed, but in which, on the contrary, nature and civilization respect each other, seek for and clasp each other, for the health and joy of man, in a mutual embrace.

Between these two banks of the river, and between its steeples and its towers--between the tops of its oaks, respected by the constructors of these new quarters--you perceive a movable forest of masts, which ascend and descend perpetually the course of the Thames, and streak it with a thousand lines of smoke, while the steamers, loaded with passengers, stream out like a river of smoke above the river of water which carries them. But it is not in the newly constructed quarters alone that London has changed its appearance, and presents that image of opulence, of comfort, and of labor, with thriving--the city itself, that furnace at the same time blackened and infect of this human ebullition, has enlarged its issues, widened its streets, ennobled its monuments, extended and straightened its suburbs, and made them more healthy. The ignoble lanes, with their suspicious taverns, where the population of drunken sailors huddled together like savages in dregs and dust, have been demolished. They have given place to airy streets, where the passers-by, coming back from the docks, those entrepôts of the four continents, pass with ease in carriages or on foot--to spacious and clean houses, to modest but decent shops, where the maritime population find, on disembarking, clothes, food, tobacco, beer, and all the objects of exchange necessary for the retail trade of seaports: those streets are now as well cleaned from filth, from drunkenness and obscenity, as the other streets and suburbs of the city. One can pass through them without pity and without disgust; one feels in them the vigilance of public morality and the presence of a police which, if it can not destroy vice, can at all events keep it at a distance from the eyes of the passer-by, and render even the _cloacæ_ inoffensive.

In the country districts and secondary towns around London the same transformation is observable. The innumerable railways which run in every direction all over England have covered the land with stations, coal depôts, new houses for the persons employed, elegant offices for the administration, viaducts, bridges over the lines to private properties; and all these things impart to England, from the sea to London, the appearance of a country which is being cleared, and where the occupants are employed in running up residences for themselves. Every thing is being built, and every thing is smoking, hurrying on, so perfectly alive is this soil; one feels that the people are eager to seize on the new sense of circulation which Providence has just bestowed on man.

Such is England in a physical sense, sketched broadly. As to political England, the following are the changes which struck me. I describe them as I reviewed them, with sincerity, it is true, but not unmixed with astonishment. The appearance of the people in the streets is no longer what filled me with consternation twenty years ago. In place of those ragged bands of beggars--men, women, and children--who swarmed in the narrow and gloomy streets of the manufacturing town, you will see well-dressed workmen, with an appearance of strength and health, going to work or returning peaceably from their workshop with their tools on their shoulders; young girls issuing without tumult from the houses where they work, under the superintendence of women older than themselves, or of a father or brother, who brings them back to their home; from time to time you see numerous columns of little children of from five to eight years of age, poorly but decently clad, led by a woman, who leaves them at their own doors, after having watched over them all day. They all present the appearance of relative comfort, of most exquisite cleanliness, and of health. You will perceive few, if any, idle groups on the public ways, and infinitely fewer drunken men than formerly; the streets appear as if purged of vice and wretchedness, or only exhibit those which always remain the scum of an immense population.

If you converse in a drawing-room, in a public carriage, at a public dinner table, even in the street, with men of the different classes in England; if you take care to be present, as I did, at places where persons of the most advanced opinions meet and speak; if you read the journals, those safety-valves of public opinion, you must remain struck with the extreme mildness of men's minds and hearts, with the temperance of ideas, the moderation of what is desired, the prudence of the Liberal Opposition, the tenderness evinced toward a conciliation of all classes, the justice which all classes of the English population render to each other, the readiness of all to co-operate, each according to his means and disposition, in advancing the general good--the employment, comfort, instruction, and morality of the people--in a word, a mild and serene air is breathed in place of the tempest blast which then raged in every breast. The equilibrium is re-established in the national atmosphere. One feels and says to one's self, "This people can come to an understanding with itself. It can live, last, prosper, and improve for a long time in this way. Had I my residence on this soil, I should not any longer tremble for my hearth."

I except, it must be understood, from this very general character of harmony and reconciliation, two classes of men whom nothing ever satisfies--the demagogues and the extreme aristocrats--two tyrannies which can not content themselves with any liberty, because they eternally desire to subjugate the people--the one by the intolerance of the rabble, the other by the intolerance of the little number. The newspapers of the inexorable aristocracy, and of the ungovernable radicalism, are the only ones that still contrast by their bitterness with the general mildness of opinions in Great Britain. But some clubs of Chartists, rendered fanatical by sophistry, and some clubs of diplomatists, rendered fanatical by pride, only serve the better to show the calm and reason which are more and more prevailing in the other parts of the nation. The one make speeches to the emptiness of places where the people are invited to meet, and the others pay by the line for calumnies and invective against France and against the present age. No one listens, and no one reads. The people work on. The intelligent Tories lament Sir Robert Peel, and accept the inheritance of his Conservative doctrines by means of progress.

It appears that a superhuman hand carried away during that sleep of twenty years, all the venom which racked the social body of this country. If a Radical procession is announced, as on the 10th of April, 250,000 citizens, of all opinions, appear in the streets of London as special constables, and preserve the public peace against these phantoms of another time. Such is the present appearance of the public mind in England to a stranger.

[From the Ladies' Companion.]

THE HAUNTS OF GENIUS. GRAY, BURKE, MILTON, DRYDEN, AND POPE.

BY MARY RUSSELL MITFORD.

Two summers ago I spent a few pleasant weeks among some of the loveliest scenery of our great river. The banks of the Thames, always beautiful, are nowhere more delightful than in the neighborhood of Maidenhead--one side ramparted by the high, abrupt, chalky cliffs of Buckinghamshire; the other edging gently away into our rich Berkshire meadows, checkered with villages, villas, and woods.

My own temporary home was one of singular beauty--a snug cottage at Taplow, looking over a garden full of honeysuckles, lilies, and roses, to a miniature terrace, whose steps led down into the water, or rather into our little boat; the fine old bridge at Maidenhead just below us; the magnificent woods of Cliefden, crowned with the lordly mansion (now, alas! a second time burnt down), rising high above; and the broad majestic river, fringed with willow and alder, gay with an ever-changing variety--the trim pleasure-yacht, the busy barge, or the punt of the solitary angler, gliding by placidly and slowly, the very image of calm and conscious power. No pleasanter residence, through the sultry months of July and August, than the Bridge cottage at Taplow.

Besides the natural advantages of the situation, we were within reach of many interesting places, of which we, as strangers, contrived--as strangers usually do--to see a great deal more than the actual residents.

A six-mile drive took us to the lordly towers of Windsor--the most queenly of our palaces--with the adjuncts that so well become the royal residence, St. George's Chapel and Eton College, fitting shrines of learning and devotion! Windsor was full of charm. The ghostly shadow of a tree, that is, or passes for Herne's oak--for the very man of whom we inquired our way maintained that the tree was apocryphal, although in such cases I hold it wisest and pleasantest to believe--the very old town itself, with the localities immortalized by Sir John and Sir Hugh, Dame Quickly and Justice Shallow, and all the company of the Merry Wives, had to me an unfailing attraction. To Windsor we drove again and again, until the pony spontaneously turned his head Windsor-ward.

Then we reviewed the haunts of GRAY, the house at Stoke Pogis, and the church-yard where he is buried, and which contains the touching epitaph wherein the pious son commemorates "the careful mother of many children, one of whom only had the misfortune to survive her." To that spot we drove one bright summer day, and we were not the only visitants. It was pleasant to see one admirer seated under a tree, sketching the church, and another party, escorted by the clergyman, walking reverently through it. Stoke Pogis, however, is not without its rivals; and we also visited the old church at Upton, whose ivy-mantled tower claims to be the veritable tower of the "Elegy." A very curious scene did that old church exhibit--that of an edifice not yet decayed, but abandoned to decay; an incipient ruin, such as probably might have been paralleled in the monasteries of England after the Reformation, or in the churches of France after the first Revolution. The walls were still standing, still full of monuments and monumental inscriptions; in some the gilding was yet fresh, and one tablet especially had been placed there very recently, commemorating the talents and virtues of the celebrated astronomer, Sir John Herschell. But the windows were denuded of their glass, the font broken, the pews dismantled, while on the tottering reading-desk one of the great Prayer-books, all mouldy with damp, still lay open--last vestige of the holy services with which it once resounded. Another church had been erected, but it looked new and naked, and every body seemed to regret the old place of worship, the roof of which was remarkable for the purity of its design.

Another of our excursions was to Ockwells--a curious and beautiful specimen of domestic architecture in the days before the Tudors. Strange it seems to me that no one has exactly imitated that graceful front, with its steep roof terminated on either side by two projecting gables, the inner one lower than the other, adorned with oak carving, regular and delicate as that on an ivory fan. The porch has equal elegance. One almost expects to see some baronial hawking party, or some bridal procession issue from its recesses. The great hall, although its grand open roof has been barbarously closed up, still retains its fine proportions, its dais, its music gallery, and the long range of windows, still adorned with the mottos and escutcheons of the Norreys's, their kindred and allies. It has long been used as a farm-house; and one marvels that the painted windows should have remained uninjured through four centuries of neglect and change. Much that was interesting has disappeared, but enough still remains to gratify those who love to examine the picturesque dwellings of our ancestors. The noble staircase, the iron-studded door, the prodigious lock, the gigantic key (too heavy for a woman to wield), the cloistered passages, the old-fashioned buttery-hatch, give a view not merely of the degree of civilization of the age, but of the habits and customs of familiar daily life.

Another drive took us to the old grounds of Lady Place, where, in demolishing the house, care had been taken to preserve the vaults in which the great Whig leaders wrote and signed the famous letter to William of Orange, which drove James the Second from the throne. A gloomy place it is now--a sort of underground ruin--and gloomy enough the patriots must have found it on that memorable occasion: the tombs of the monks (it had formerly been a monastery) under their feet, the rugged walls around them, and no ray of light, except the lanterns they may have brought with them, or the torches that they lit. Surely the signature of that summons which secured the liberties of England would make an impressive picture--Lord Somers in the foreground, and the other Whig statesmen grouped around him. A Latin inscription records a visit made by George the Third to the vaults; and truly it is among the places that monarchs would do well to visit--full of stern lessons!

Chief pilgrimage of all was one that led us first to Beaconsfield, through the delightful lanes of Buckinghamshire, with their luxuriance of hedge-row timber, and their patches of heathy common. There we paid willing homage to all that remained of the habitation consecrated by the genius of EDMUND BURKE. Little is left, beyond gates and outbuildings, for the house has been burnt down and the grounds disparked; but still some of his old walks remained, and an old well and traces of an old garden--and pleasant it was to tread where such a man had trodden, and to converse with the few who still remembered him. We saw, too, the stalwart yeoman who had the honor not only of furnishing to Sir Joshua the model of his "Infant Hercules," but even of suggesting the subject. Thus it happened. Passing a few days with Mr. Burke at his favorite retirement, the great painter accompanied his host on a visit to his bailiff. A noble boy lay sprawling in the cradle in the room where they sat. His mother would fain have removed him, but Sir Joshua, then commissioned to paint a picture for the Empress Catherine, requested that the child might remain, sent with all speed for pallet and easel, and accomplished his task with that success which so frequently waits upon a sudden inspiration. It is remarkable that the good farmer, whose hearty cordial kindness I shall not soon forget, has kept in a manner most unusual the promise of his sturdy infancy, and makes as near an approach to the proportions of the fabled Hercules as ever Buckinghamshire yeoman displayed.

Beaconsfield, however, and even the cherished retirement of Burke, was by no means the goal of our pilgrimage. The true shrine was to be found four miles farther, in the small cottage at Chalfont St. Giles, where Milton found a refuge during the Great Plague of London.

The road wound through lanes still shadier and hedge-rows still richer, where the tall trees rose from banks overhung with fern, intermixed with spires of purple foxglove; sometimes broken by a bit of mossy park-paling, sometimes by the light shades of a beech-wood, until at last we reached the quiet and secluded village whose very first dwelling was consecrated by the abode of the great poet.

It is a small tenement of four rooms, one on either side the door, standing in a little garden, and having its gable to the road. A short inscription, almost hidden by the foliage of the vine, tells that MILTON once lived within those sacred walls. The cottage has been so seldom visited, is so little desecrated by thronging admirers, and has suffered so little from alteration or decay, and all about it has so exactly the serene and tranquil aspect that one should expect to see in an English village two centuries ago, that it requires but a slight effort of fancy to image to ourselves the old blind bard still sitting in that little parlor, or sunning himself on the garden-seat beside the well. Milton is said to have corrected at Chalfont some of the sheets of the "Paradise Lost." The "Paradise Regained" he certainly composed there. One loves to think of him in that calm retreat--to look round that poor room and think how Genius ennobles all that she touches! Heaven forfend that change in any shape, whether of embellishment or of decay, should fall upon that cottage!

Another resort of ours, not a pilgrimage, but a haunt, was the forest of old pollards, known by the name of Burnham Beeches. A real forest it is--six hundred acres in extent, and varied by steep declivities, wild dells, and tangled dingles. The ground, clothed with the fine short turf where the thyme and the harebell love to grow, is partly covered with luxuriant fern; and the juniper and the holly form a fitting underwood for those magnificent trees, hollowed by age, whose profuse canopy of leafy boughs seems so much too heavy for the thin rind by which it is supported. Mr. Grote has a house here on which we looked with reverence; and in one of the loveliest spots we came upon a monument erected by Mrs. Grote in memory of Mendelssohn, and enriched by an elegant inscription from her pen.

We were never weary of wandering among the Burnham Beeches; sometimes taking Dropmore by the way, where the taste of the late Lord Grenville created from a barren heath a perfect Eden of rare trees and matchless flowers. But even better than amid that sweet woodland scene did I love to ramble by the side of the Thames, as it bounded the beautiful grounds of Lord Orkney, or the magnificent demesne of Sir George Warrender, the verdant lawns of Cliefden.

That place also is full of memories. There it was that the famous Duke of Buckingham fought his no less famous duel with Lord Shrewsbury, while the fair countess, dressed, rather than disguised, as a page, held the horse of her victorious paramour. We loved to gaze on that princely mansion--since a second time burnt down--repeating to each other the marvelous lines in which our two matchless satirists have immortalized the duke's follies, and doubting which portrait were the best. We may at least be sure that no third painter will excel them. Alas! who reads Pope or Dryden now? I am afraid, very much afraid, that to many a fair young reader these celebrated characters will be as good as manuscript. I will at all events try the experiment. Here they be:

"In the first rank of these did Zimri stand
A man so various, that he seemed to be
Not one, but all mankind's epitome;
Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,
Was every thing by starts and nothing long;
But in the course of one revolving moon,
Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon,
Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking
Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking.
Blest madman, who could every hour employ
With something new to wish or to enjoy!"

DRYDEN. _Absalom and Achitophel._

Now for the little hunchback of Twickenham:

"In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung,
The walls of plaster, and the floor of dung;
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red:
Great Villiers lies:--but, ah, how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim,
Gallant and gay in Cliefden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love!
Or just as gay at council 'mid the ring
Of mimic statesmen and their merry king!
No wit to flatter left of all his store;
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more;
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends
And fame, the lord of useless thousands ends?"

POPE. _Moral Essays._

FLOWERS IN THE SICK ROOM.

Among the terrors of our youth we well remember there were certain poisonous exhalations said to arise from plants and flowers if allowed to share our sleeping-room during the night, as though objects of loveliness when seen by daylight took advantage of the darkness to assume the qualities of the ghoul or the vampire. Well do we remember how maternal anxiety removed every portion of vegetable life from our bedroom, lest its gases should poison us before morning! This opinion, and the cognate one that plants in rooms are always injurious, is prevalent still, and it operates most unfavorably in the case of the bed-ridden, or the invalid, by depriving them of a chamber garden which would otherwise make time put off his leaden wings, and while away, in innocent amusement, many a lagging hour. Now we assure our readers that this is a popular superstition, and will endeavor to put them in possession of the grounds on which our statement is founded. In doing so, we do not put forth any opinions of our own, but the deductions of science, for the truth of which any one acquainted with vegetable physiology can vouch.

Plants, in a growing state, absorb the oxygen gas of the atmosphere, and throw off carbonic acid; these are facts, and as oxygen is necessary to life and carbonic acid injurious to it, the conclusion has been jumped at that plants in apartments _must_ have a deleterious influence. But there is another fact equally irrefragable, _that plants feed on the carbonic acid of the atmosphere_, and are, indeed, the grand instruments employed in the laboratory of Nature for purifying it from the noxious exhalations of animal life. From the spacious forests to the blade of grass which forces itself up through the crevices of a street pavement, every portion of verdure is occupied in disinfecting the air. By means of solar light the carbonic acid, when taken in by the leaves, is decomposed, its carbon going to build up the structure of the plant and its disengaged oxygen returning to the air we breathe. It is true that this process is stopped in the darkness, and that then a very small portion of carbonic acid is evolved by plants; but as it is never necessary for a patient to sleep in a room with flowers, we need say nothing on that subject. Cleanliness, and other considerations, would suggest having a bedroom as free as possible during the night, and our object is answered if we show that vegetation is not injurious in the day. That it is, on the contrary, conducive to health, is a plain corollary of science.

Perhaps the error we are speaking of may have originated from confounding the effects of the _odors_ of plants with a general result of their presence. Now, all strong scents are injurious, and those of some flowers are specially so, and ought on no account to be patronized by the invalid. But it happens, fortunately, that a very large class of plants have either no scent at all, or so little as to be of no consequence, so that there is still room for an extensive selection. This, then, is _one_ rule to be observed in chamber gardening. Another is, that the plants admitted should be in perfect health, for while growing vegetation is healthful, it becomes noxious when sickly or dead. Thirdly, let the most scrupulous cleanliness be maintained; the pots, saucers, and the stands being often subjected to ablutions. Under this head also we include the removal of dying leaves, and all flowers, before they have quite lost their beauty, since it is well known that the petals become unpleasant in some varieties as soon as the meridian of their brief life is passed. By giving attention to these simple regulations, a sick chamber may have its windows adorned with flowers without the slightest risk to the health of the occupant, and in saying this we open the way to some of the most gentle lenitives of pain, as well as to sources of rational enjoyment. If those who can go where they please, in the sunshine and the shade, can gather wild flowers in their natural dwellings, and cultivate extensive gardens, still find pleasure in a few favorites in-doors, how much more delight must such treasured possessions confer on those whom Providence has made prisoners and who must have their all of verdure and floral beauty brought to them!

[From Dickens's Household Words.]

LIVELY TURTLE.

A SKETCH OF A CONSERVATIVE.

I have a comfortable property. What I spend, I spend upon myself; and what I don't spend I save. Those are my principles. I am warmly attached to my principles, and stick to them on all occasions.

I am not, as some people have represented, a mean man. I never denied myself any thing that I thought I should like to have. I may have said to myself "SNOADY"--that is my name--"you will get those peaches cheaper if you wait till next week;" or, I may have said to myself, "Snoady, you will get that wine for nothing, if you wait till you are asked out to dine;" but I never deny myself any thing. If I can't get what I want without buying it, and paying its price for it, I _do_ buy it and pay its price for it. I have an appetite bestowed upon me; and, if I balked it, I should consider that I was flying in the face of Providence.

I have no near relation but a brother. If he wants any thing of me, he don't get it. All men are my brothers; and I see no reason why I should make his an exceptional case.

I live at a cathedral town where there is an old corporation. I am not in the Church, but it may be that I hold a little place of some sort. Never mind. It may be profitable. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It may, or it may not, be a sinecure. I don't choose to say, I never enlightened my brother on these subjects, and I consider all men my brothers. The negro is a man and a brother--should I hold myself accountable for my position in life, _to him_? Certainly not.

I often run up to London. I like London. The way I look at it, is this. London is not a cheap place, but, on the whole, you can get more of the real thing for your money there--I mean the best thing, whatever it is--than you can get in most places. Therefore, I say to the man who has got the money, and wants the thing, "Go to London for it, and treat yourself."

When _I_ go, I do it in this manner. I go to Mrs. Skim's Private Hotel and Commercial Lodging House, near Aldersgate-street, City (it is advertised in "Bradshaw's Railway Guide," where I first found it), and there I pay, "for bed and breakfast, with meat, two and ninepence per day, including servants." Now, I have made a calculation, and I am satisfied that Mrs. Skim can not possibly make much profit out of _me_. In fact, if all her patrons were like me, my opinion is, the woman would be in the Gazette next month.

Why do I go to Mrs. Skim's when I could go to the Clarendon, you may ask? Let us argue that point. If I went to the Clarendon I could get nothing in bed but sleep; could I? No. Now, sleep at the Clarendon is an expensive article; whereas, sleep at Mrs. Skim's, is decidedly cheap. I have made a calculation and I don't hesitate to say, all things considered, that it's cheap. Is it an inferior article, as compared with the Clarendon sleep, or is it of the same quality? I am a heavy sleeper, and it is of the same quality. Then why should I go to the Clarendon?

But as to breakfast? you may say. Very well. As to breakfast. I could get a variety of delicacies for breakfast at the Clarendon, that are out of the question at Mrs. Skim's. Granted. But I don't want to have them! My opinion is, that we are not entirely animal and sensual. Man has an intellect bestowed upon him. If he clogs that intellect by too good a breakfast, how can he properly exert that intellect in meditation, during the day upon his dinner? That's the point. We are not to enchain the soul. We are to let it soar. It is expected of us.

At Mrs. Skim's I get enough for breakfast (there is no limitation to the bread and butter, though there is to the meat), and not too much. I have all my faculties about me, to concentrate upon the object I have mentioned, and I can say to myself besides, "Snoady, you have saved six, eight, ten, fifteen shillings, already to-day. If there is any thing you fancy for your dinner, have it, Snoady, you have earned your reward."

My objection to London, is, that it is the head-quarters of the worst radical sentiments that are broached in England. I consider that it has a great many dangerous people in it. I consider the present publication (if it's "Household Words") very dangerous, and I write this with the view of neutralizing some of its bad effects. My political creed is, let us be comfortable. We are all very comfortable as we are--_I_ am very comfortable as I am--leave us alone!

All mankind are my brothers, and I don't think it Christian--if you come to that--to tell my brother that he is ignorant, or degraded, or dirty, or any thing of the kind. I think it's abusive, and low. You meet me with the observation that I am required to love my brother. I reply, "I do." I am sure I am always willing to say to my brother, "My good fellow, I love you very much; go along with you; keep to your own road; leave me to mine; whatever is, is right; whatever isn't, is wrong; don't make a disturbance!" It seems to me, that this is at once the whole duty of man, and the only temper to go to dinner in.

Going to dinner in this temper in the city of London, one day not long ago, after a bed at Mrs. Skim's, with meat-breakfast and servants included, I was reminded of the observation which, if my memory does not deceive me, was formerly made by somebody on some occasion, that man may learn wisdom from the lower animals. It is a beautiful fact, in my opinion, that great wisdom is to be learned from that noble animal the turtle.

I had made up my mind, in the course of the day I speak of, to have a turtle dinner. I mean a dinner mainly composed of turtle. Just a comfortable tureen of soup, with a pint of punch, and nothing solid to follow, but a tender juicy steak. I like a tender juicy steak. I generally say to myself when I order one, "Snoady, you have done right."

When I make up my mind to have a delicacy, expense is no consideration. The question resolves itself, then, into a question of the very best. I went to a friend of mine who is a member of the Common Council, and with that friend I held the following conversation.

Said I to him, "Mr. Groggles, the best turtle is where?"

Says he, "If you want a basin for lunch, my opinion is, you can't do better than drop into Birch's."

Said I, "Mr. Groggles, I thought you had known me better, than to suppose me capable of a basin. My intention is to dine. A tureen."

Says Mr. Groggles, without a moment's consideration, and in a determined voice. "Right opposite the India House, Leadenhall-street."

We parted. My mind was not inactive during the day, and at six in the afternoon I repaired to the house of Mr. Groggles's recommendation. At the end of the passage, leading from the street into the coffee-room, I observed a vast and solid chest, in which I then supposed that a turtle of unusual size might be deposited. But, the correspondence between its bulk and that of the charge made for my dinner, afterward satisfied me that it must be the till of the establishment.

I stated to the waiter what had brought me there, and I mentioned Mr. Groggles's name. He feelingly repeated after me, "A tureen of turtle, and a tender juicy steak." His manner, added to the manner of Mr. Groggles in the morning, satisfied me that all was well. The atmosphere of the coffee-room was odoriferous with turtle, and the steams of thousands of gallons, consumed within its walls, hung, in savory grease, upon their surface. I could have inscribed my name with a penknife, if I had been so disposed, in the essence of innumerable turtles. I preferred to fall into a hungry reverie, brought on by the warm breath of the place, and to think of the West Indies and the Island of Ascension.

My dinner came--and went. I will draw a vail over the meal, I will put the cover on the empty tureen, and merely say that it was wonderful--and that I paid for it.

I sat meditating, when all was over, on the imperfect nature of our present existence, in which we can eat only for a limited time, when the waiter roused me with these words.

Said he to me, as he brushed the crumbs off the table, "Would you like to see the turtle, sir?"

"To see what turtle, waiter?" said I (calmly) to him.

"The tanks of turtle below, sir," said he to me.

Tanks of turtle! Good gracious! "Yes!"

The waiter lighted a candle, and conducted me down stairs to a range of vaulted apartments, cleanly white-washed and illuminated with gas, where I saw a sight of the most astonishing and gratifying description, illustrative of the greatness of my native country. "Snoady," was my first observation to myself, "Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves!"

There were two or three hundred turtle in the vaulted apartments--all alive. Some in tanks, and some taking the air in long dry walks littered down with straw. They were of all sizes; many of them enormous. Some of the enormous ones had entangled themselves with the smaller ones, and pushed and squeezed themselves into corners, with their fins over water-pipes, and their heads downward, where they were apoplectically struggling and splashing, apparently in the last extremity. Others were calm at the bottom of the tanks; others languidly rising to the surface. The turtle in the walks littered down with straw, were calm and motionless. It was a thrilling sight. I admire such a sight. It rouses my imagination. If you wish to try its effect on yours, make a call right opposite the India House any day you please--dine--pay--and ask to be taken below.

Two athletic young men, without coats, and with the sleeves of their shirts tucked up to the shoulders, were in attendance on these noble animals. One of them, wrestling with the most enormous turtle in company, and dragging him up to the edge of the tank, for me to look at, presented an idea to me which I never had before. I ought to observe that I like an idea. I say, when I get a new one, "Snoady, book that!"

My idea, on the present occasion, was--Mr. Groggles! It was not a turtle that I saw, but Mr. Groggles. It was the dead image of Mr. Groggles. He was dragged up to confront me, with his waistcoat--if I may be allowed the expression--toward me; and it was identically the waistcoat of Mr. Groggles. It was the same shape, very nearly the same color, only wanted a gold watch-chain and a bunch of seals, to BE the waistcoat of Mr. Groggles. There was what I should call a bursting expression about him in general, which was accurately the expression of Mr. Groggles. I had never closely observed a turtle's throat before. The folds of his loose cravat, I found to be precisely those of Mr. Groggles's cravat. Even the intelligent eye--I mean to say, intelligent enough for a person of correct principles, and not dangerously so--was the eye of Mr. Groggles. When the athletic young man let him go, and, with a roll of his head, he flopped heavily down into the tank, it was exactly the manner of Mr. Groggles as I have seen him ooze away into his seat, after opposing a sanitary motion in the Court of Common Council!

"Snoady," I couldn't help saying to myself, "you have done it. You have got an idea, Snoady, in which a great principle is involved. I congratulate you!" I followed the young man, who dragged up several turtle to the brinks of the various tanks. I found them all the same--all varieties of Mr. Groggles--all extraordinarily like the gentlemen who usually eat them. "Now, Snoady," was my next remark, "what do you deduce from this?"