some dog, and you wish to exhibit him-eh, coz?"

"Now, Arthur, be quiet, or I will drive you

out?"

"Oh, do be amiable, Ellen! I have encountered a regular domestic storm, or rather I experienced all the inconvenience of the thunder and lightning without being actually exposed to the elementary influences; for I was in the library while your mamma blew the household up, in the dining-room. To give you a full statement-for I heard, although I put my fingers in my ears-it seems Aunt Lucy settled some bills this morning, the family purse coming out minus twenty-five dollars thereby. Natural inference is that it enriched the pocket of the opposite party, the said persons being Miss Ross, and Catherine the cook. The latter makes delightful blanc-mange and French soups, and therefore is not to be suspected for a moment; and the lamented, but inevitable consequence is, Miss Ross's dismissal. By the way, what a fine-looking person she is! I saw her in the hall this morning. She has a figure Juno might envy! She had dropped her shawl. She does not look like a dishonest person does she?"

"Does what? I have not heard a word you have said for the last ten minutes." And the eyes were raised from a minute survey of the pattern of Brussels carpet or the toe of her tiny slipper, or both, to the speaker's face.

"I will not have to go over it all, will I?" with a ludicrous affectation of dismay. "I believe the sum total of my remark was that Miss Ross did not look like a dishonest person."

Miss Ellen Graham was not a reader of countenances at least, she had never noticed Miss Ross's face. She thought her quite a plain-looking person.

Her cousin noticed the unamiable tone, the level gaze of the blue eyes, and the flush of the cheeks, extending even to the white throat; and naturally thought he was particularly unfortunate in vexing Nell while all the fellows were out of town, and he would have to bear the brunt of her ill-humour till he brought her around again.

She was wondering whether, in spite of the morning's resolutions, she could give him up, and take the realities of her life again contented and happy, believing all for the best. The whole experience of the day had been unpleasant, having been marked by an unusually large number of discordant scales and false notes on the part of her pupils, and an unusual impatience of spirit and irritability of temper on her side; either fact with equal probability might be supposed to be the cause or consequence of the other.

The freshened wind blew coolly on her forehead, and it was pleasant to know there was some one in the whole world on whom she could rest after the labours and trials of the day. "It was weak, yet womanly," she murmured to herself; "yet was it just to him?" The momentary irresolution was put aside, and she told of her morning's thoughts and temptations. "It was not right," she said, stifling the quick throb of the heart that recoiled from the she should be a burden on his fresh young very thought of life unshared by him, "that energies. She was not free to love and wed whom she chose. It was wise and right, for Heaven had willed it so, and she must and would accept her destiny without a murmur. The path she must tread was pointed out to her; but he might choose his own-might take a smoother path, and lead a brighter life."

Could Heaven have given her a sweeter blessing than his words: "Your path is mine, and you are my life, Margaret"?

The walk was extended far through the that at last, from her doorstep, watched his redusky street, and the parting gaze of the eyes treating figure through the shadows, was an unspoken blessing. Unusually deep and fervent hood, "Lead us not into temptation," found on was the utterance that the prayer of her childher lips that night. Lead us not into the temptation of envy and despondency, and deliver us from the evils of bitter thoughts and repinings. More equally divided than we, in life; and who shall say one to the other: "You our short-seeing dream, are the temptations of should not murmur; lo, your cross is light!"

FLAXMAN RUINED FOR AN ARTIST.-He had loved he should be able to work with an intenser never doubted that in the company of her whom he spirit; but of another opinion was Sir Joshua Reynolds. "So, Flaxman," said the President, one day, as he chanced to meet him, "I am told you are married; if so, sir, I tell you you are ruined for an artist." Flaxman went home, sat down beside his wife, took her hand, and said with a smile, "I am ruined for an artist." "John," said she, "how has this happened, and who has done it?" happened," said he," in the church, and Ann Den

"It

man has done it: I met Sir Joshua Reynolds just now, and he said marriage has ruined me in my man's brow; but this worthy couple understood each profession." For a moment a cloud hung on Flaxother too well to have their happiness seriously marred by the unguarded and peevish remark of a wealthy old bachelor.- Women of Worth.

HAMPSTEAD AND THE HEATH.

BY GOLDTHORN HILL.

They linger in the woods, and on the Heath; and if we collate the catalogue of them with those that bloom there now, we shall find that-with the exception of the ophreys and lilies of the valley, which in his time and subsequently (as I have elsewhere said), grew here familiarly as in the woods of Kent and Berkshire-only a very few are wanting.

drawn sword by the side of his lady-love's twentieth part of Gerard's flowers are here. coach, on her way to town from the Flask walk, or of the masked and mounted highwayman that the two Fieldings did their best to extirpate from the adjacent roads, but whose exploits did not cease till pretty close upon the present century. I find in the historical chronicle of the "Gentleman's Magazine" for January, 1773, an account of a gentleman's being taken up and examined on suspicion of having stopped and robbed the Hampstead stage, between eight and nine o'clock at night, near the Mother Red-cap. He wore a crape over his face, which flew up, and one of the witnesses whom he had pulled out of the coach, swore to his nose, as did also two gentlewomen fellow-passengers; but the gods desert not their own, and the Bacchanalian habits which, judging inferentially, had probably bestowed this marked character to the feature in question, enabled him to prove an alibi, on the evidence of three persons who had been drinking with him at the Bull, in Windmill-street, from five in the afternoon till within five minutes of eight; while the waiter at Thornton's, under the Piazza of Covent Garden, proved his being there at half-past eight; and two other acquaintances swore to meeting him at the Brown Bear, in Bow-street, about nine; so that between the Bull and the Brown Bear, there was no time left for the Mother Red-cap, and the gentleman was thereupon discharged.

Here again I have fallen out of the straight chronological line, and am slipping into sidepaths; but these digressions suit me, and in writing these papers I have made no compact with my readers, but to render them as pleasant as I can. If, then, it pleases me to spend a day in searching for that particular brown lizard amongst the golden furze-blooms on the Heath that Bradley found there, and no one since; or to fall back three centuries, and trace (in spirit) the steps of Master Gerard from his house, in Holborn, through Gray's Inn-lane, and Pancras Meadows, and the little village of Kentish Town, past the Queen's Dairy-house (the last trace of which is but just removed), and so through the gate which led into Hampstead Wood, and out upon the Heath, am I not free to do so? And being so, how can I resist taking the "Great Herbal," for a guide, and making glades, and woods and hills reblossom with full handfuls of the fair flowers he found there? What, if it be mid-winter, can I not by a single effort of imagination make it May, and see the Spring's coming of age, and all the floral festa of that consummation? Primroses scattering largess in the woods, and blue-bells chiming out their triple majors; and lilies of the valley, like whiterobed acolytes, swinging with every air their odour-laden censers. Or crowding windflowers, with sensuous bends, and graceful swayings, and troops of quaintly masking orchidea; and in the rear, the trailing dogrose, like a May-day mummer, all over dressed with flowers!

So the floral procession passes by; but ont a

Within the remnant of Ken-wood, the goldenrod (Viergeaurea solidago) still throws the gleam of its pale yellow flowers through the thick undergrowth struggling to the path; and the trailing periwinkle (Vinca major) spreads its varnished ever-green leaves, in shady places, in the same locality. Here still the betony (B. officinalis) lifts its purple head, and the wood strawberry roots its creeping stems, and ripens its scarlet-cushioned fruit, while summer lasts; and though I have not found the great St. John's wort, gladdening the shadows of the underwood with its bright gamboge-coloured flowers, nor the little Neottia spirales (our ladies' tresses), with its small curled spike of white blossoms, growing fragrant at the hour of the vesper ave, more than one species of Hypericum still abounds; and the yellow pimpernel affects its ancient habitat, and spreads its graceful stems, and ovate shiny leaves and solitary blossoms, as in the days when Queen Elizabeth's physician figured them. The wild rose and the woodbine, the brionys (white and black), and traveller's joy, still give their beauty and sweetness to the hedge-rows; and the high taper (Verbascum thapsus) lifts up its clubshaped spike of golden-yellow handsome flowers, and powders the ground around it with the cottony under-lining of its large coarse leaves. In many places in the wood, from the first coming of "chilly-fingered Spring," till deep in winter, the tragic-looking white dead-nettle (Lamium album), with its deeply serrated, dusky leaves, and whorles of snow-white gaping flowers with black-tipped stamens, may be found; as well as its congener, the showy yellow deadnettle (Galeobdolon luteun), of whose existence the old botanist was unaware, for he did not even reckon it amongst our rustic Flora. Then there are the agrimony, and the avens, with their pretty flowers of a ripe-corn colour, and the pink-willow herb, and blue germander, and in the gloomy shadows of the wood (about Candlemas in genial seasons) the nodding daffodils still hang their fringy solitary flowers, as full of sleepy juices as when the daughter of Ceres played with them in Sicilian fields, and Dis surprised her.

But it is on the Heath that the botanist will find the scions of the largest number of the plants that figure in the "Great Herbal,” and in the first catalogue of British plants.

In our own day, as when these works were written, we find the straight-stemmed lemoncoloured flowers of the upright mouse-ear hawkweed (Hiericum pilosella), springing as thickly through the close short turf, as when Parkinson wrote that one could scarcely set a foot but on

the head of it. Now, as then, the pretty vari- | identified, by deposits in the sea, on the Dorsetcoloured milkwort (Polygala vulgaris), pink, shire coast. white, or blue, enamels the ground with its To return to my jottings of the Hampstead lowly blossoms; and the bright round corollas Flora: I must not be supposed to have enuof the trailing tormentil (Potentilla reptans) merated nearly all the plants as proper to the glitters in pretty contrast with the diminutive Heath in these Victorian days, as in those of spikes of Veronica serpyllifolium, or Paul's Elizabeth. I have merely mentioned the most betony. Piercing the greensward in the moister remarkable, or the most frequent of them, places, we find the blue spikes of common fearing to extend my botanical digression, bugle (Ajuga reptans), and the bright rose- which, however pleasant to lady-saunterers coloured petals of the gay red-rattle (Pedicularis upon the ground, may not be equally so to palustris), with the silvery ones of ladies' smock general readers. But before I return to com(Cardamine pratensis), and tall-stemmed spear- paratively modern times, let me not forget a wort (Ranunculus lingua), with shining yellow passing word of good Master Turner-not the cups, and the clustered torquoise-coloured Elizabethan botanist of that name, but that flowers of the forget-me-not (Myosotis palustris). civic Silvanus of the Heath, the retired hatter, Here also, seated on their slight pink foot-stalks, who, having here his "suberbanum," amused the pale green, glossy, orbicular leaves of marsh his leisure by planting the avenue of fir-trees, penny-wort (Hydrocotyle vulgaris) prevail; and the mast-like red trunks and dusky stormtufts of heath-rush, with panicles of brown contorted heads of which make such a flowers, and the silken locks of the lesser cotton- picturesque feature on the Heath. If I misgrass, wave in the sun beside the margin of the take not, the Nine Elms," which have since worn-out water-course made tragic in our times become famous in local history, were also as the scene of the Sadleir suicide. In the of his planting, as well as many others of the shallow water of the "standing pool" are beds trees in the vicinity. A wood, known as of water-trefoil-buck-bean-(Menyanthes tri-"Turner's-wood," where the lilies of the valley foliata), one of the most exquisite of our British wild-flowers. The sun-dew also (Drosera), with its ensanguined leaves and crook-shaped racemes of diminutive white flowers on slender stems, is found growing in the same localities.

Between the uplands and the bog we find a flowery strata (so to speak) of solary plants, that love to lie in the sun, and were some of them dedicated to it. Great beds of healthful chamomile (Anthemis nóbilis) and eyebright (Euphrasia officinalis), with shrubby stem, dark, deeply serrated leaves, and small white flowers, exquisitely veined with yellow and purple, and as full of healing for the dim sight now as when Milton sang of "rue and euphrasy." Here also the grey-blue globose heads of the sheep's scabious abound, and groups of slender broom-branches flutter their large-winged yellow flowers in the breeze; and we tread in the solstitial season on little purple mounds of aromatically-scented thyme, and meet the mingling perfumes of the heath and ling, and the peachy odour of the gorze, growing in golden clumps and circles, and at the sight of which I have| heard that Fredrika Bremer, like her great countryman Linnæus, shed tears of pleasure. Mixed with these comes the fainter sweetness of the knotted dodder (Cuscuta epithymum), the thread-like stems of which I have often found in great red tangles coiled about these bushes.

air.

No wonder that Hampstead still preserves its hygienic reputation, and that from summer to summer, invalids find their way to the ancient village (often too late) with the hope of bribing life with greedy lungfuls of the sweet pure Not but that sometimes, in the spring and autumn, the atmosphere of the Heath is affected by London smoke, a volume of which has been seen carried beyond Richmond Park by an east wind; and even beyond Reading, thirtynine miles off; and more recently has been

lingered latest, afterwards became noted as the site of New Georgia-a tea-drinking house and pleasure-grounds, with water-works and various ingenious contrivances, laid out and invented by a sexegenarian, in 1737, who appears to have possessed considerable mechanical skill, and not a little humour in the contrivances with which he amused his visitors.

The cottage-on which an inscription set forth that he had built it with his own hands*-contained several little rooms, in one of which a chair sank on a person's sitting in it; while another contained a pillory, into which, when a gentleman put his head, he could only be released by the ladies of his party kissing him-a grace which the free manners of the times allowed on the part of maids and matrons without the fear of scandal or Sir Creswell Creswell. I subsequently learn from contemporary writings that this contrivance became exceedingly popu lar; and the "Connoisseur" informs me that it made a favourite Sunday-recreation of the citizens', to put their necks into the pillory at New Georgia.

From the announcement in the foregoing footnote, I presume that Robert Caston was included in the catalogue of his own curiosities, and accepted as part of the exhibition, which was opened to the public the year Queen Caroline died; and repaid, it is to be hoped, as a speculation, the ingenious labour of the proprietor. Subsequently, Turner's-wood, with the

*The inscription was as follows: "I, Robert Caston, begun this place in a wild wood-stubbed up the wood, digged all the ponds, cut all the walks, made all the gardens, built all the rooms with my own hands. Nobody drove a nail here, laid a brick or a tile, but myself-and thank God for giving me such strength at 64 years of age, when I began it."

gardens, ponds, labyrinths, &c., of which New Georgia consisted, were absorbed in Ken-wood (I love the old word best, preserving as it does the British name of the kerns, or oak-woods, that from antique times overspread its site), and whose descendants, of various species,* perpetuate themselves from century to century, and overhang the hill-sides with masses of indigenous verdure; or rise, in solitary grandeur, on lawn and glade.

Eighteen years later, how like the crowning chapter of a grand romance it reads! When Lord Bute ("for a cause that did him honour," the payment of his debts) sold the estate, Lord Mansfield (Mr. Murray), the ere-while lawstudent and lodger at the "Chicken-house," under this title and as Lord Chief-Justice of England accomplished the desire of his almost romantic attachment to Hampstead, and became proprietor of the lovely spot in the neighbourhood of which he had so often lingered.

upon him that he had not hardly and justly earned.

From the period of what is called the Augustine age of English literature, to the date 1746, when Mr. Horace Walpole, walking under the gloomy arch of Temple-bar, saw the heads of some of these "unfortunate gentlemen" adding new horror to its ghastly trophies, and people making a trade by letting spy-glasses to the passers-by, at a halfpenny a look, Hampstead had claims to be considered, if not the literary suburb which it subsequently became, at least an appanage of the Muses. If their most famous representatives did not absolutely live here, they were at all events frequent visitors: nay, they themselves were assumed, for the time, to have forsaken

"Aganippa's font,

And hoof-ploughed Hippocrane," (DRAYTON for the wimpling brooklets of the breeze-swept Heath, and a local poet,* referring to this period, sings:

Notwithstanding the sneers of Malone, it is impossible, in tracing the career of Lord Mansfield, not to coincide with Boswell's opinion: that he was 66 no mere lawyer." The life-long friend and companion of many of the wits and poets of his day must have had more in him than good company to have maintained their friendship, or to have felt much sympathy in their society. Of them, though not one of them (for there is much more poetry in human nature than finds utterance in rhymed vocables) the courage, faith, and self-reliance, that precious-A yet easily-packed portion that sat as lightly on the poor, but well-born boy, as he himself on the back of the rough Scotch pony on which he made his two-months journey to the metropolis-like the younger son in a fairy-tale, with three good gifts for his fortune-have in themselves the elements of the finest poetry, action, and adventure.

To me he seems through life to have personally retained these elements-to have acted poetry though he did not write it, and to have owed to the strong will, the brave heart, and noble ambition (which assume high places as their meed, and not as the price of truckling policy, or moral meanness) the achievement of eminence that has won him an historical name independent of his father's, and has made that of Mansfield little less memorable than Murray. Roscoe tells us that his success was the legitimate and logical result of the means he sedulously employed to secure it; and remembering his want of wealth and family influence with the reigning powers; remembering, too, that he was more than suspected of drinking the Pretender's health on his knees; and even examined on the subject before the Privy Council, and accused at the same time of having, on the trial of the Scotch rebels (when Solicitor-General), referred to them as "unfortunate gentlemen," instead of applying to them de rigueur the proper opprobrious epithet-it is pretty evident that he had no honours thrust

* Loudon.

"The Muses, since the birth of Time,

Have ever dwelt on heights sublime :
On Pindus now they gather flowers;
Now sported in Parnassian bowers;
And late, when MURRAY deigned to rove
Beneath Caen-wood's sequestered grove,
They wandered off, when all was still,
With him and POPE to Hampstead Hill."

terminus suspiciously suggestive of the Upper Flask. But no; the Kit-Cat Club had long since ceased to exist-half the debators and convivialists had closed their teeth upon last words and last bumpers for ever. And had it been otherwise, I can imagine a higher sympathy between these men, than that begotten of champagne and the admirable patties of Christopher Cat, leading them abroad into the calm and silence of the summer nights upon the Heath.

I can fancy the pale, deeply-lined face of Pope, with some of its old sweetness and animation brightening it, and flashing in his fine eyes, as his sense of freedom from pump-room and promenade conventionalities expands; and leaning his feeble frame with the contracted side nearest to his friend, he walks lightly over the elastic turf, on which the moonlight exaggerates his deformity and caricatures his wide-skirted coat, three-cornered hat, and the little sword he wears. But Pope is familiar with the ugly shadow, and knows himself superior to it, and is indifferent. Least of all does it affect him now in the congenial fellowship of the faithful friend, whom he has known from his young manhood upwards, whom he will trust after death.†

Moreover, at noon-day, into whatever assemblage he carries that little gibbous frame of his, the people crowd around, or as when Sir Joshua saw him at a book-auction four years

*Ed. Coxe, Esq.

Mr. Murray was Pope's executor.