vast storehouse of noble verse, which few but Lamb had then explored. It is from Daniel's Pastoral Drama of Hymen's Triumph. It was a bold experiment to introduce into a romance, deluged with eighteenth century sentiment, the verse of an Elizabethan. Yet Daniel, the "well-languaged," is at his best so modern that no incongruity is felt; and with many a reader the lines have doubtless passed as from one of Lamb's contemporaries:

Ah, I remember well (and how can I
But ever more remember well?) when first

Our flame began, when scarce we knew what

was

Lamb has told us of his re-visiting these scenes of his childhood in later life, when only the ruins of the old house remained. It was in the year 1822 that the demolition of Blakesware was actually completed. And it would be probably in that year that Lamb paid the visit recorded in the essay, Blakesmoor in H- shire. "Journeying northward lately," he writes, "I could not resist going some few miles out of my road to look upon the remains of an old great house with which I had been impressed in this way in infancy. I was apprised that the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have

The flame we felt; when as we sat and sighed, And looked upon each other, and conceived Not what we ailed, yet something we did ail; And yet were well, and yet we were not well, And what was our disease we could not tell. Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look. And thus

In that first garden of our simpleness

We spent our childhood. But when years began To reap the fruit of knowledge; ah, how then Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow,

Check my presumption and my forwardness; Yet still would give me flowers, still would me

shew

What she would have me, yet not have me know,

perished, that so much solidity with magnificence could not have been crushed all at once into the mere dust and rubbish which I found it. The work of ruin had proceeded with a swift hand indeed, and the demolition of a few weeks had reduced it to an antiquity. I was astonished at the indistinction of everything. Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the courtyard? Whereabouts did the outhouses commence? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately, so spacious. . . . Had I seen these brick and mortar knaves at this process of destruction, at the plucking of every panel I should have felt the varlets at

T

my heart. I should have cried out to them to spare a plank at least out of the cheerful store-room, in whose hot window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass plot before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp, that ever haunted it, about me-it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns- or a panel of the yellow room."

Until lately no adequate picture of the old house was known to be in existencenothing in fact, I believe, except the rough sketch already referred to, made by Luppino the scene-painter, as a hint for his own purposes, to serve perhaps as a background for some drama of rural life at Covent Garden. But happily some more careful hand was to copy and preserve the features of the old place before it became the "mere dust and rubbish" which Lamb found it. It must have been indeed just before the final demolition described by Lamb, that an artist was employed to make a drawing of the house for a copy of Clutterbuck's Hertfordshire, which a wealthy collector and connoisseur was in the process of illustrating, and which by the addition of a vast number of such illustrations he enlarged from its original two volumes to a magnificent set of ten. This fine copy has lately come into the hands of Messrs. Robson and Kerslake, of Coventry Street, and by their courtesy I am able to give the view of Blakesware. The "work of ruin," it will be observed, had already begun, but not so far but that the position of the great gates, the courtyard, and the outhouses is still apparent. The trees of the "wilderness are to be seen in the distance, and the pretty brawling brook flows, as when Lamb first discovered it, a few roods distant from the mansion.

A few more facts about the house as Lamb first knew it are to be found in the essay Dream Children. With that strange love of mystifying which never deserted him even when his emotions were most deeply stirred, Lamb here places the old mansion of his childhood in Norfolk-apparently because in that county occurred the incidents on which the legend of the Babes in the Wood was founded, and because by a mere coincidence that story contributed something to the decorations of Blakesware House. "Certain it is," he says, and here, it might seem, he meant to emphasise a fact, "that the whole story of the children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimneypiece of the great hall, the whole story down to the robin redbreasts; till a foolish rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of modern invention in its stead with no

story upon it." A little later on, he tells how Blakesware had its haunted room, and that it was the room occupied by his old grandmother, and that the form the apparition took was one of two infants, "to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near where she slept—but she said those innocents would do her no harm." Did Lamb invent the haunted staircase to fit the legend of the Babes in the Wood; or was there really a ghost story of Blakesware, taking some such shape as this, and did he create the old carved chimney-piece to match it? There was a haunted room at Blakesware. He speaks of it again in the Blakesmoor Essay, as that in which old Mrs. Battle died. And curiously enough there actually was a legend in the Plumer family of an ancestor who had two children, who mysteriously and suspiciously disappeared, and in default of whom the baronetcy, borne by one Walter Plumer at the close of the seventeenth century, was lost to the family. We can well imagine old Mrs. Field with her memory (as Lamb has testified) so full of "anecdote domestic" and family tradition, telling this story over and over again by the winter fire to her two grandchildren, at that age when such stories most fascinate and impress, and its lingering in Charles Lamb's mind with features just distinct enough to prompt this fantastic blending of the theme with that of the orphan children of the immortal ballad-the subject too of Morton's touching after-piece, in which Fanny Kelly played the elder child.

"She kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived," continues Elia in the same essay, "which afterwards came to decay, and was nearly pulled down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried off to the owner's other house." This other house was at Gilston, in the same county, and thither the marbles and the tapestries of Blakesware were removed. Gilston itself was pulled down about the year 1850, and a second Gilston, like the second Blakesware, has sprung up a few yards from its predecessor. The marbles and tapestries were once more dispersed, and can no longer be traced. But a few of the less valuable ornaments of old Blakesware, when it was pulled down, became the spoil or the perquisites of the villagers. and I have seen in a Widford cottage a carved chimney-piece and some oak panelling that form the last relics of that "extinguished habitation."

Only a mile distant from Ware, and within easy reach of Blakesware House, is the pretty village of Amwell, on that London road by

The

which Charles and Mary had so often travelled to and fro on their holiday visits. young boy and his guardian sister could never have forgotten the singular picturesqueness of Amwell Church standing on its green height with Lea and New River gently flowing at its foot-now almost embowered in trees and shrubs, but a hundred years ago, as old pictures show us, standing out for all to see, "plain as way to parish church." Amwell had its own poet at that season, Scott, the Quaker,-"Scott of Amwell," as he was commonly called-who celebrated its beauties not without a genuine feeling of their attractions. But Scott had not the strength (or is it courage?) to resist the conventionalities and commonplaces of the eighteenth century fashion of approaching nature. He is forgotten, and not undeservedly. He could not have made Amwell famous, as Cowper made Olney, or John Dyer made Grongar Hill. It is Amwell, rather, that has embalmed the name of the gentle Quaker. Most persons, to whom it is anything more than the name of a place, know it through the opening pages of Isaac Walton. Few perhaps remember that Charles and

Mary, when they began their task of writing for Godwin's Juvenile Library, laid the scene of Mrs. Leicester's School in this pleasant village. "To the Young Ladies of Amwell School," so the governess begins her dedicatory letter, wherein she describes how on the first evening of re-assembling after the holidays, she had persuaded her little friends, shy and home-sick and nervous, to tell each her little story in turn, to wile away the weary hour before bedtime, and had then committed them to paper for the amusement of coming generations. There is something wonderfully touching in Charles and Mary Lamb thus turning again and again for inspiration, may we not say, to these dear haunts of their childhood. If they had had no such memories to which to revert, how could they have fought against the depression and the temptations of those first days of struggle for existence in their London loneliness? It is Emerson, I think, who points out how the affections are the real quickener of the intellect; how we halt and hesitate over our essay and treatise, and then, sitting down to write to a friend, how thoughts come speeding in and clothe themselves at once in

easiest and fittest speech. So it was with the brother and sister. They headed their sheet of paper "Widford" or "Amwell," and tender memories and happy associations flocked round them, and at once gave invention and fancy their delightful liberty. "My father is the curate of a village church about five miles from Amwell," so little Elizabeth Villiers begins her short and simple annals, in the opening story of Mrs. Leicester's School. Who can doubt that the village church five miles away was Widford, where Mary Lamb had so often listened to good Mr. Hambly on the hot summer Sundays? There was something in a village church-and, alas! especially when it was empty!-that had a

Essay: "The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty—an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory--or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain glory, on that of the preacher puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonising the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness? Go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church, think of the piety that has kneeled there-the congregations old and young that have found consolation therethe meek pastor, the docile parishioner.

life-long charm for Charles Lamb. Something in the Excursion, when he first read it, touched this chord in him, and he writes to Wordsworth accordingly. "One feeling I was particularly struck with as what I recognised so very lately at Harrow Church on entering it after a hot, secular day's pleasure, the instantaneous cooling and calming, almost transforming properties of a country church just entered; a certain fragrance which it has, either from its holiness, or being kept shut all the week, or the air that is let in being pure country, exactly what you have reduced into words-but I am feeling that which I cannot express." The same thought he was to expand, after his common custom, later on in the opening of the Blakesmoor

With no disturbing emotions, no cross, conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee."

Lamb had relatives in other parts of the country. In a letter to Manning, in 1819, he asks, "How are my cousins, the Gladmans of Wheathampstead, and farmer Bruton ? Mrs. Bruton is a glorious woman. 'Hail! Mackery End.' This is a fragment of a blank verse poem which I once meditated, but got no further.' Old Mrs. Field of Blakesware, had been a Bruton, and a native of the same part of Hertfordshire, the neighbourhood of Wheathampstead. A sister of hers had married a small farmer of the name

of Gladman, and she and her husband occupied the farmhouse of Mackery End at the time of Lamb's earliest recollections of the place. It is, as Lamb describes it, "delightfully situated within a gentle walk from Wheathampstead," in fact about a mile and a half from that town. Lamb mentions that in old maps of the country it was spelt-"perhaps more properly," he adds-Mackarel End; but this variation savours too strongly of such changes as from " Asparagus" to "SparrowGrass," to commend it to the rigid philologist. It is now, in any case, further reduced to "Mackrye" End, and is, it may be presumed, the name of one "end" of the Wheathampstead Parish, and is not to be associated with any one dwelling in it. The principal Mackrye End house is a handsome old Jacobean mansion, only a few yards distance from which stands the farmhouse celebrated in Elia's essay. The farmer's residence has been rebuilt since Lamb's day, and is a rather demonstratively modern dwelling of bright red brick, but the barns and other farm buildings in the rear, look as if they might be the identical ones which met his view, when, on that summer day of 1816, or thereabouts, after a thirty years absence, he and his sister paid their memorable visit. By a somewhat circuitous route," he tells us, taking the noble park at Luton in our way from St.

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Albans, we arrived at the spot of our anxious curiosity about noon." As yet the Great Northern Railway with its branch line from Hatfield to Wheathampstead was not; and the brother and sister with their companion Barron Field, travelled doubtless by a Bedford coach, taking the road through St. Albans and Harpenden to Luton. Harpenden is but two miles or so from the place of their destination, but on that delicious morning in the "heart of June," they preferred the longer drive on the coach top, and the pleasant seven mile trip after they had left the coach at Luton, by the "noble park," then belonging to the Butes, and following the course of Walton's "loved Lea stream,' till they once more turned north again, by Batford Mill, pausing perhaps, in their walk to wonder at some curious boulders of Hertfordshire "plum pudding stone "-up the hill, and through fields of waving green wheat, to the pleasant home of Farmer Bruton. "The sight of it," Charles Lamb has told us, "though every trace of it was effaced from my recollections, affected me with a pleasure which I had not experienced for many a year. For though I had forgotten it, we had never forgotten being there together, and we had been talking about Mackery End all our lives, till memory on my part became mocked with a phantom of itself, and I thought I