that peculiar charm of English scenery, a green common, divided by the road; the right side fringed by hedge-rows and trees, with cottages and farm houses irregularly placed, and terminated by a double avenue of noble oaks; the left, prettier still, dappled by bright-pools of water, and islands of cottages and cottage gardens, and sinking gradually down to corn-fields and meadows, and an old farm-house, with pointed roofs and clustered chimneys, looking out from its blooming orchard, and backed by woody hills.'-(pp. 14—16.)

6

6

Among Miss Mitford's sketches of rural scenes for which we cannot find room, we may notice with sincere praise The Winter Landscape,' (p. 27.) and The Orchard Harvest,' (p. 242.) Of her descriptions of rural character, The Village Beau,' (pp. 188 -198.) has merit and humour, and Country Boys,' (pp. 206-9.) are evidently drawn from the life, and with considerable spirit. But beyond all comparison, the best portrait of low life in the volume is that of Tom Cordery, the poacher of the wild northof-Hampshire country,' as she calls it;-a country of which we know something ourselves. It is a kind of border land of humanity, with more rudeness and desolation of aspect than the traveller might look for within half a day's journey of this great metropolis; a desert through which the Loddon-Pope's Loddonsteals its infant course, marking its track by a low valley of scanty verdure and of gnarled and stunted oaks; an oasis of cultivation in a wild ocean of heath, which swells into huge dark billows of hills, and repairs its want of absolute mountain grandeur by the imposing effect of its immensity of solitude. On the skirts of this dreary region, fifty years ago, the highwayman prowled; and it is less than half that period since the major part of its scattered population were deer-stealers, who exercised their depredations upon the adjacent royal forest of Windsor. The peasantry of this district, where market-towns are not, and in which, until lately, there was little busy intercourse, are still half a century behind the rest of the country in civilization. The very hamlet churches which they frequent have the touch of antiquity upon them, and the thinly planted farm-houses bear record, with their peaked gables and pointed chimnies, of the passage of two centuries. Miss Mitford's Tom Cordery is a faithful copy of the poacher of the last generation who stalked through these wilds, and we doubt not that a few individuals of the same species may be found in them even at this day. There is something of the manner of Crabbe in her delineation; but we shall take part of it as it stands.

This human oak grew on the wild North-of-Hampshire country, of which I have before made honourable mention; a country of heath and hill, and forest, partly reclaimed, inclosed, and planted by some of the greater proprietors, but for the most part uncultivated and uncivilized;

a proper

a proper refuge for wild animals of every species. Of these the most notable was my friend Tom Cordery, who presented in his own person no unfit emblem of the district in which he lived-the gentlest of savages, the wildest of civilized.men. He was by calling rat-catcher, hare-finder, and broom-maker; a triad of trades which he had substituted for the one grand profession of poaching, which he followed in his younger days with unrivalled talent and success, and would, undoubtedly, have pursued till his death, had not the bursting of an overloaded gun unluckily shot off his left hand. As it was, he still contrived to mingle a little of his old unlawful occupation with his honest callings; was a reference of high authority amongst the young aspirants, an adviser of undoubted honour and secrecy-suspected, and more than suspected, as being one "who, though he played no more, o'erlooked the cards." Yet he kept to windward of the law, and indeed contrived to be on such terms of social and even friendly intercourse with the guardians of the game on M. common, as may be said to prevail between reputed thieves and the myrmidons of justice in the neighbourhood of Bow-street.'

Never did any human being look more like that sort of sportsman commonly called a poacher. He was a tall, finely-built man, with a prodigious stride, that cleared the ground like a horse, and a power of continuing his slow and steady speed, that seemed nothing less than miraculous. Neither man, nor horse, nor dog, could out-tire him. He had a bold, undaunted presence, and an evident strength and power of bone and muscle. You might see by looking at him, that he did not know what fear meant. In his youth he had fought more battles than any man in the forest. He was as if born without nerves, totally insensible to the recoils and disgusts of humanity. I have known him take up a huge adder, cut off its head, and then deposit the living and writhing body in his brimless hat, and walk with it coiling and wreathing about his head, like another Medusa, till the sport of the day was over, and he carried it home to secure the fat. With all this iron stubbornness of nature, he was of a most mild and gentle demeanour, had a fine placidity of countenance, and a quick blue eye beaming with good humour. His face was sunburnt into one general pale vermilion hue that overspread all his features; his very hair was sunburnt too.'—

Every body liked Tom Cordery. He had himself an aptness to like, which is certain to be repaid in kind-the very dogs knew him, and loved him, and would beat for him almost as soon as for their master. Even May, the most sagacions of greyhounds, appreciated his talents, and would as soon listen to Tom sohoing as to old Tray giving tongue.

Behind those sallows, in a nook between them and the hill, rose the uncouth and shapeless cottage of Tom Cordery. It is a scene which hangs upon the eye and the memory, striking, grand-almost sublime, and above all, eminently foreign. No English painter would choose such a subject for an English landscape; no one, in a picture, would take it for English. It might pass for one of those scenes which have furnished models to Salvator Rosa. Tom's cottage was, however, very thoroughly national and characteristic; a low, ruinous hovel, the door

of

of which was fastened with a sedulous attention to security, that con trasted strangely with the tattered thatch of the roof and the half broken windows. No garden, no pig-stye, no pens for geese, none of the usual signs of cottage habitation:-yet the house was covered with nonde, script dwellings, and the very walls were animate with their extraordi→ nary tenants; pheasants, partridges, rabbits, tame wild-ducks, half tame hares, and their enemies by nature and education, the ferrets, terriers, and mongrels, of whom his retinue consisted. Great ingenuity had been evinced in keeping separate these jarring elements; and by dint of hutches, cages, fences, kennels, and half-a-dozen little hurdled inclosures, resembling the sort of courts which children are apt to build round their card-houses, peace was in general tolerably well preserved. Frequent sounds, however, of fear or of anger, as their several instincts were aroused, gave token that it was but a forced and hollow truce; and at such times the clamour was prodigious. Tom had the remarkable tenderness for animals when domesticated, which is so often found in those, whose sole vocation seems to be their destruction in the field; and the one long, straggling, unceiled, barn-like room, which served for kitchen, bed-chamber, and hall, was cumbered with bipeds and quadru peds of all kinds and descriptions-the sick, the delicate, the newly caught, the lying-in. In the midst of this menagerie sate Tom's wife, (for he was married, though without a family-married to a woman lame of a leg, as he himself was minus an arm,) now trying to quiet her noisy inmates, now to outscold them. How long his friend, the keeper, would have continued to wink at this den of live game, none can say: the roof fairly fell in during the deep snow of last winter, killing, as poor Tom observed, two as fine litters of rabbits as ever were kittened. Remotely, I have no doubt that he himself fell a sacrifice to this misad venture. The overseer, to whom he applied to re-instate his beloved habitation, decided that the walls would never bear another roof, and removed him and his wife, as an especial favour, to a tidy, snug, com, fortable room in the work-house. The work-house! From that hour poor Tom visibly altered. He lost his hilarity and independence. It was a change such as he had himself often inflicted-a complete change of habits, a transition from the wild to the tame. No labour was demanded of him; he went about as before, finding hares, killing rats, selling brooms; but the spirit of the man was departed. He talked of the quiet of his old abode, and the noise of his new; complained of children and other bad company; and looked down on his neighbours with the sort of contempt with which a cock pheasant might regard a barn-door fowl. Most of all did he, braced into a gipsy-like defiance of wet and cold, grumble at the warmth and dryness of his apartment. He used to foretell that it would kill him, and assuredly it did so. Never could the typhus fever have found out that wild hill side, or have lurked under that broken roof. The free touch of the air would have chased the demon. Alas, poor Tom! warmth, and snugness, and com fort, whole windows and an entire ceiling, were the death of him. Alas, poor Tom!-pp. 165-176.

After this, we turn to a sketch of quite an opposite character—

the

the portrait of an Old Bachelor;' a lover of gastronomic science, who knew when a wild-duck was roasted to half a turn,' a man of family, and a retired fellow of a college.

In person he was a tall, stout, gentlemanly man, "about fifty, or by'r lady inclining to threescore," with fine features, a composed gravity of countenance and demeanour, a bald head most accurately powdered, and a very graceful bow-quite the pattern of an elderly man of fashion. His conversation was in excellent keeping with the calm imperturbability of his countenance and the sedate gravity of his mannersmooth, dull, common-place; exceedingly safe, and somewhat imposing, He spoke so little, that people really fell into the mistake of imagining that he thought; and the tone of decision with which he would advance some second-hand opinion, was well calculated to confirm the mistake. Gravity was certainly his chief characteristic, and yet it was not a clerical gravity either. He had none of the generic marks of his profession. Although perfectly decorous in life, and word, and thought, no stranger ever took Mr. Sidney for a clergyman. He never did any duty any where, that ever I heard of, except the agreeable duty of saying grace before dinner; and even that was often performed by some lay host, in pure forgetfulness of his guest's ordination. Indeed, but for the direction of his letters, and an eye to *** rectory, I am persuaded that the circumstance might have slipped out of his own recollection.

His quality of old bachelor was more perceptible. There lurked under all his polish, well covered but not concealed, the quiet selfishness, the little whims, the precise habits, the primness and priggishness of that disconsolate condition. His man Andrews, for instance, valet, groom, and body-servant abroad; butler, cook, caterer, and majordomo at home; tall, portly, powdered and black-coated as his master, and like him in all things but the knowing pig-tail, which stuck out horizontally above his shirt collar, giving a ludicrous dignity to his appearance; Andrews, who, constant as the dial pointed nine, carried up his chocolate and shaving-water, and regular as "the chimes at midnight," prepared his white-wine whey; who never forgot his gouty shoe in travelling, (once, for two days, he had a slight touch of that gentlemanly disorder,) and never gave him the newspaper unaired; to whom could this jewel of a valet, this matchless piece of clock-work belong, but an old bachelor? And his little dog Viper, unparagoned of terriers, black, sleek, sharp, and shrewd; who would beg and sneeze, and fetch and carry, like a Christian; eat olives, and sweetmeats, and mustard, drink coffee, and wine, and liqueurs; who but an old bachelor could have taught Viper his multifarious accomplishments?'

Perhaps the chance of a rubber had something to do with his visits to our house. If there be such a thing as a ruling passion, the love of whist was his. Cards were not merely the amusement, but the business of his life. I do not mean as a money-making speculation; for although he belonged to a fashionable club in London, and to every card-meeting of decent gentility within reach of his country home, he never went beyond a regular moderate stake, and could not be induced to bet even

by

by the rashest defier of calculation, or the most provoking undervaluer of his play. It always seemed to me that he regarded whist as far too important and scientific a pursuit to be degraded into an affair of gambling. It had in his eyes all the dignity of a study; an acquirement equally gentlemanly and clerical. It was undoubtedly his test of ability. He had the value of a man of family and a man of the world, for rank, and wealth, and station, and dignities of all sorts. No human being entertained a higher respect for a king, a prince, a prime-minister, a duke, a bishop, or a lord. But these were conventional feelings. His genuine and unfeigned veneration was reserved for him who played a good rubber, a praise he did not easily give. He was a capital player himself, and held all his country competitors, except one, in supreme and undisguised contempt, which they endured to admiration. I wonder they did not send him to Coventry. He was the most disagreeable partner in the world, and nearly as unpleasant an adversary; for he not only enforced the Pythagorean law of silence, which makes one hate whist so, but used to distribute, quite impartially, to every one at table, little disagreeable observations on every card they played. It was not scolding, or grumbling, or fretting; one has a sympathy with those expressions of feeling, and at the worst can scold again; it was a smooth polite commentary on the errors of the party, delivered in the calm tone of undoubted superiority with which a great critic will sometimes take a small poet, or a batch of poets, to task in a review. How the people could bear it!—but the world is a good-natured world, and does not like a man the less for treating it scornfully.'-p. 179.

Besides this picture of the Old Bachelor,' we would direct the reader's notice to two other papers of the same kind in the collection, Modern Antiques,' (p. 36.) and The Talking Lady,' (p. 107.)—both abounding in arch and amusing touches of character, which prove that Miss Mitford has observation and tact, and playful badinage, to catch higher follies as they fly, than the whims and eccentricities of village life. We hope she will employ these qualities for the future gratification of her readers; and we part from her in her own good-humoured mood, and with no disinclination to be her debtors for another smile.

ART. X.-A Tour in Germany, and some of the Southern Provinces of the Austrian Empire, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822. Edinburgh. 2 vols. 1824.

THESE volumes are ushered into the world with a modesty

not common in our days. Will our readers believe that they are in duodecimo, and are actually without name, dedication, preface, introduction, vignette, or margin? But, whilst they make no professions, they are full of curious and interesting matter; offer a very masterly sketch of the present condition of Germany, moral,

political,