parisons-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. Journeying northward lately, 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 apprized that the owner of it had lately pulled it down; still I had a vague notion that it could not all have 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 every thing. Where had stood the great gates? What bounded the court-yard? Whereabout did the out-houses commence? A few bricks only lay as representatives of that which was so stately and so spacious. Death does not shrink up his human victim at this rate. The burnt ashes of a man weigh more in their proportion. Had I seen these brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of destruction, at the plucking of every pannel I should have felt the varlets at 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-plat before, and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted it, about me—i -it is in mine ears now, as oft as summer returns-or a pannel of the yellow room. Why, every plank and pannel of that house for me had magic in it. The tapestried bed-rooms -tapestry so much better than painting-not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots-at which childhood ever and anon would steal a look, shifting its coverlid, (replaced as quickly,) to exercise its tender courage in a momentary eye-encounter with those stern bright visages, staring reciprocally-all Ovid on the walls, in colours vivider than his descriptions. Acteon in mid sprout, with the unappeasable prudery of Diana; and the still more provoking, and almost culinary coolness of Dan Phoebus, eel-fashion, deliberately divesting of Marsyas. Then, that haunted room--in which old Mrs. Battle died-whereinto I have crept, but always in the day-time, with a passion of fear; and a sneaking curiosity, terror-tainted, to hold communication with the past.-How shall they build it up again? It was an old deserted place, yet not so long deserted but that traces of the splendour of past inmates were everywhere apparent. Its furniture was still standing-even to the tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks, in the nursery, which told that children had once played there. But I was a lonely child, and had the range at will of every apartment, knew every nook and corner, wondered and worshipped everywhere. The solitude of childhood is not so much the mother of thought, as it is the feeder of love, and silence, and admiration. So strange a passion for the place possessed me in those years, that, though there lay-I shame to say how few roods distant from the mansion-half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake-such was the spell which bound me to the house, and such my carefulness not to pass its strict and proper precincts, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the Lacus Incognitus of my infancy. Variegated views, extensive prospects-and those at no great distance from the house-I was told of such-what were they to me, being out the boundaries of my Eden?-So far from a wish to roam, I would have drawn, methought, still closer the fences of my chosen prison; and have been hemmed in by a yet securer cincture of those excluding garden walls. I could have exclaimed with that garden-loving poet Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines; I was here as in a lonely temple. Snug fire * Marvell, on Appleton House, to the Lord Fairfax. sides the low built roof-parlours ten feet by ten-frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home --these were the condition of my birth--the wholesome soil which I was planted in. Yet, without impeachment to their tenderest lessons, I am not sorry to have had glances of something beyond; and to have taken if but a peep, in childhood, at the contrasting accidents of a great fortune. To have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary, in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree-at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them. The claims of birth are ideal merely and what herald shall go about to strip me of an idea? Is it trenchant to their swords? Can it be hacked off as a spur can? or torn away like a tarnished garter? What else, were the families of the great to us? what pleasure should we take in their tedious genealogies, or their capitulatory brass monuments? What to us the uninterrupted current of their bloods, if our own did not answer within us to a cognate and correspondent elevation? Or wherefore, else, O tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon-that hung upon the time-worn walls of thy princely stairs, BLAKESMOOR!-have I in childhood so oft stood poring upon thy mystic characters-thy emblematic supporters, with their prophetic "Resurgam"-till, every dreg of pea santry purging off, I received into myself Very Gentility? Thou wert first in my morning eyes; and of nights, hast detained my steps from bedward, till it was but a step from gazing at thee to dreaming on thee. This is the only true gentry by adoption; the veritable change of blood, and not, as empirics have fabled, by transfusion. Who it was by dying that had earned the splendid trophy, I know not, I inquired not; but its fading rags, and colours cobweb-stained, told that its subject was of two centuries back. And what if my ancestor at that date was some Damotas-feeding flocks, not his own, upon the hills of Lincoln-did I in less earnest vindicate to myself the family trappings of this once proud Egon?-repaying by a backward triumph the insults he might possibly have heaped in his lifetime upon my poor pastoral progenitor. If it were presumption so to speculate, the present owners of the mansion had least reason to complain. They had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle; and I was left to appropriate to myself what images I could pick up, to raise my fancy, or to soothe my vanity. I was the true descendant of those old Wand not the present family of that name, who had fled the old waste places. -S; Mine was that gallery of good old family portraits, which as I have traversed, giving them in fancy my own family name, one-and then another-would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas, to recognise the new relationship; while the rest looked grave, as it seemed, |