yet, assured of his integrity of heart and purpose, she greatly took to him. And so he tells how, when he came up from Encombe to Claremont, to be present at her confinement, according to legal and court requirement, she ordered him the best room, while some of the other lords had to sleep on the carpet.

In writing to Walter Savage Landor, in a letter before referred to, Southey says: There was a much deeper and more general grief than could have been expected, or would easily be believed. Two or three persons have told me that in most houses which they entered in London the women were in tears. The nation's darling was buried on the 19th in the Royal Vault, Windsor. Southey's Funeral Song was no conventional tribute of the laureate :

Once during this year the good old King 'was visited '-I use the words of Mr. Jesse 'with a few rays of reason, which, however, proved as transitory as on former similar mournful occasions. It was probably at this time, when his sense of hearing is said to have been temporarily improved, that, his ear happening to catch the sound of the passing-bell of Windsor Church, he inquired for whom it was tolling. The deceased, he was given to understand, was a person whom he had known, and for whose character he entertained a respect the wife of one of his neighbours, a Windsor tradesman. She was a good woman,' he said; 'she brought up her family in the fear of God. She has gone to heaven, and I hope I shall soon follow her.' With the departure of

these last deceitful gleams of returning reason the King's mind appears to have become an unimpressible blank. Well and pathetically might he have repeated the grand and mournful lines of Milton, which I give in full:

Thus with the year

Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine ;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.

So much the rather thou, celestial light,

Shine inward, and the mind, through all her powers,
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to niortal sight.

On December 18 came on the well-known trial of William Hone, which was carried on through the 19th and 20th, ending in his acquittal. As those are living who remember it well, he defended himself, and with no common ability. There can be no doubt of the inischievous tendency of his publications at this time; the satisfaction is that in afteryears he came to a better mind, and Southey, who in 1820 wrote to his friend C. Wynn, saying that such things as the 'House that Jack built' ought to have been prosecuted immediately, was enabled to express himself thus pleasantly to Rickman in 1829: 'Remember me most kindly to Lamb, and tell him that the "Every Day and Table Books" have given me a great liking for his friend Hone, whom I would shake hands with heartily if he came in my way.' In afteryears Southey recommended them to the 'Last of the Old Squires,' for his amusement in his latter days, and he was greatly pleased with them.

I think it was in this winter that I saw several tench, half frozen and alive, in the shallow pond under the withy trees in the Sibberscott bank field, which you enter over the little

brook that runs down to Shorthill; and the Shrewsbury boy remembers Ovid's lines :

:

Vidimus in glacie pisces hærere ligatos,

Et pars ex illis tum quoque viva fuit.

One evening about this time I watched a water-ousel in the Rea running under the water, and can thus corroborate the remark of Charles St. John in his 'Natural History and Sport': 'The water-ousel manages to run on the ground at the bottom of the water in search of its food.'

I also watched the immovable stateliness of a heron in a shallow pool adjoining our great pool. He was watching for his prey with one leg up, and I was hid in the bushes and close enough to watch him, but did not see him catch a fish, as something disturbed him. Dick Hiley said that it was the oil of the leg that attracted the fish to him. So in Sweden, as Mr. Lloyd tells us in his 'Scandinavian Adventures,' the country people think 'the legs have a peculiar odour whereby the fish are attracted to the spot.' He himself was of opinion that the droppings were the attraction; and he tells a curious story of a tame one 'who' (like our old Trap) 'had the greatest possible antipathy to beggars and other ill-clad people, and used every means in his power to prevent them from coming near to the house. He was afraid of chimneysweepers,' &c. He also disliked the colour of black in general, as much as turkeys dislike red. I wonder what is the origin of the Greek word 'crocodile 'the Egyptian xáμya? Was it from the saffron colour of some of the lizard tribe beneath the belly-looking poisonous and inspiring fear?

Having been from boyhood a great lover of Walter Scott, I venture to insert this extract from 'Lockhart's Life,' so falling in with the time

'It is at least a curious coincidence in literary history that, as Cervantes, driven from the stage of Madrid by the success of Lope de Vega, threw himself into prose romance, and produced, at the moment when the world considered him as silenced for ever, the "Don Quixote" which has outlived Lope's two thousand dramas, so Scott, abandoning verse to Byron, should have rebounded from his fall'-i.e. in Harold

the Dauntless'-'by the only prose romance which seem to be classed with the masterpieces of Spanish genius by the general judgment of Europe.'

'Rob Roy,' which he engaged on unwillingly, was published on December 31 this year, and Scott sent these lines to James Ballantyne :

With great joy

I send you Roy.
'Twas a tough job,

But we've done with Rob.

How often have I sat by the weir at Meole and on the banks of the Rea and read Scott's poems and his novels with delight; and I said, not knowing who wrote the lines, but thinking them apposite ones :

The river runneth silently,

We cannot tell what it saith;
It keepeth its secrets down below,
And so doth Death.

Since then I have had other things to read, and have had many sorrows and troubles in my ministrations-the result, no doubt, of my own shortcomings and inefficiency—and I would, through grace given, I were better than I am in every way; but, as Bishop Wilson, of Calcutta, said under much cause for trouble and distress, so say I: I have found all through my ministry that things soon get right if I can but keep myself calm and wait for God. They only become impossible when obstinacy, pride, by-ends, worldliness, self, and departures in heart from Christ lie at the bottom of the wound and fester there. Who ever reached the crown of glory without bearing the cross which leads to it? Not one.'

CHAPTER LV.

CONTINUATION OF THE REIGN OF GEORGE III.

We are but farmers of ourselves, yet may

If we can stock ourselves and thrive, uplay

Much, much, good treasure 'gainst the great rent-day.

DONNE, Poems: Letter to R. Woodward.

My memory is a chaos of aughts and ends, and fit for nobody's use but my own.-WALPOLE, To the Countess of Ossory, vol. vi. 470.

For such, alas! we are all, in such a mould are we cast, that with the too much love we bear to ourselves, being first our own flatterers, we are easily hooked with other's flattery, we are easily persuaded of others' love.-SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, Arcadia, lib. iii. p. 367, folio 1633.

The times are very interesting now, while things are yet in agitation; and yet they will appear most inconsiderable hereafter.-WALPOLE, Letters, vol. v. 53.

On God's goode Booke then let us looke

For that which never faileth;

Without which Booke, by hooke or crooke,
No worldly witt prevaileth.

PHILOBIBLON SOCIETY:

Ancient Ballads and Broadsides, p. 263.

THE winter of 1818, my Talking Friend told me, was wonderfully mild, and he did not recollect to have heard the whistle of the wild goose's wings once passing and repassing between Marton Pool and his other haunts, nor were there any flights of wild ducks. There were plenty of snipes, as usual, but very few woodcocks. And I called to mind a curious entry in Riley's Memorials of London,' under 4 Henry V., A.D. 1416, Friday, November 13: The wife of Hildy the poulterer and the wife of John Mede was committed to prison for that, against the proclamation of the Mayor, the wife of Hildy sold 4 wodecockes for 20 pence, and the wife of John Mede refused to take 12 pence for 2 partriges.' It is added in a note that on November 16 following William Emery was