enslaver was younger and not so litigious as the Worcestershire enchantress.

Mrs. Boevey died January 21, 1726-7 in her 57th year, and was buried in the family vault at Flaxley with an inscription on the walls of the chapel to her memory. There is also a monument to her in Westminster Abbey, erected by her executrix.

Sir Roger's Widow will never die.

CHAP. IX. THE COVERLEY ECONOMY.

No. 114. Wednesday, July 11, 1711. By Steele. Page 64. He would save four shillings in the Pound. The land tax; which from 1689 was continued by annual enactments, till Lowndes's act fixed it at 4s. in the pound. Gay addressed an epistle in verse to my ingenious and worthy friend William Lowndes, Esq., author of the celebrated treatise in folio called the land tax bill.' Some of the lines run thus:

'Thy copious Preamble so smoothly runs, Taxes no more appear like Legal Duns,

Lords, Knights, and Squires the Assessor's Power obey;
We read with Pleasure though with Pain we pay.'

'Poets of Old had such a wondrous Power,
That with their verses they could raise a tower;
But, in thy Prose, a greater Force is found
What Poet ever raised Three Thousand Pound?'

In 1799 the land tax was made perpetual.

CHAP. X. THE COVERLEY HUNT.

Nos. 115 and 116. Friday July 13, and Saturday 14, 1711. The former paper is by Addison, the latter by Eustace Budgell.

Page 67. Such a system of Tubes and Glands as has been before mentioned: : - viz. in the Commencement of No. 115. 'I consider the Body as a system of Tubes and Glands, or to use a more Rustic Phrase, a Bundle of Pipes and Strainers, fitted to one another after so wonderful a manner as to make a proper Engine for the Soul to work with.'

Page 69. His stable doors are patched with Noses that belonged to Foxes of the Knight's own hunting down. Although the Spectator advocated in this, and other pages, moderate indulgence in the Sports of the Field, the excessive passion of Country Gentlemen for them, to the exclusion of more intellectual pastimes, he elsewhere deplores. In a later volume he quotes a saying that the curse fulminated by Goliah having missed David, had rested on the modern Squire : 'I will give thee to the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.' The Country Gentleman was respected by his neighbours, less for morality or intellect, than for the number of Foxes' noses he could show nailed to his stables and barns.

The sedentary, though assuredly less healthful and respectable games and pastimes introduced by Charles the Second and his followers from abroad, had not, even in Queen Anne's day, become so thoroughly naturalized as they were afterwards; and ladies keenly participated in the sports of the field. The Queen herself followed the hounds in a chaise

with one horse,' which' says Swift' she drives herself; and drives furiously, like Jehu; and is a mighty hunter, like Nimrod.' She was, if Stella's journalist did not exaggerate, quite equal to runs even longer than those performed by the Coverley hounds; for, on the 7th August, 1711, she drove before dinner five and forty miles after a stag.

Page 70. Sir ROGER has disposed of his Beagles and got a pack of Stop-hounds. We infer from Blaine's Rural Sports, that when one of these hounds found the scent, he gave notice of his good fortune by deliberately squatting to impart more effect to his deep tones, and to get wind for a fresh

start.

Page 74. The Huntsman threw down his pole before the Dogs. The undrained, uncultivated condition of the country in Sir ROGER's days, made hunting on horseback by no means so easy as it is at present. The master of the pack therefore could follow straighter over bogs, morasses, and ditches, on foot, than the squire could on horseback. To assist him in leaping, the pedestrian hunter used a pole. Some of the leaps taken in this manner would surprise an equestrian huntsman of the present day.

Page 71. Sir ROGER is so keen at this Sport, that he has been out almost every Day since I came here. The Spectator arrived at Coverley Hall on one of the last days of June, and the hunt described in the paper dated as above is said to have taken place yesterday.' Mr. Budgell-who was the son of a Devonshire esquire — ought to have known better than to make Sir ROGER indulge in his favourite sport so decidedly

out of season. It is a wonder how so grave a mistake escaped editorial revision.

Page 75. The Lines out of Mr. Dryden- occur in An Epistle to his kinsman, J. Dryden, Esquire, of Chesterton.'

CHAP. XI. THE COVERLEY WITCH.

The

No. 117. Saturday, July 14, 1711. By Addison. Page 77. The following description in Otway. The lines quoted in the text are from the second Act of the Orphan. Page 86. I hear there is scarce a Village in England that has not a Moll White. The belief in witchcraft was in Anne's reign something more than merely popular. act of James (Anno: 1. cap. 12) was in full force. By it death was decreed to whoever dealt with evil or wicked spirits, or invoked them whereby any persons were killed or lamed; or discovered where anything was hidden, or provoked unlawful love, &c. Under this law two women were executed at Northampton just before the Spectator began to be published; and, not long after (1716), a Mrs Hicks and her daughter were hanged at Huntingdon for selling their souls to the devil, making their neighbours vomit pins, raising a storm so that a certain ship was almost lost, and a variety of other impossible crimes. By 1736, these superstitions abated; the Witch Act had become dormant; and, on an ignorant person attempting in that year to enforce it against an old woman in Surrey, it was repealed (10th Geo. II.)

CHAP. XII. THE COVERLEY LOVE MATCH

Spectator, No. 118. Monday, July 16, 1711. By Steele.

CHAP. XIII. THE COVERLEY ETIQUETTE.

No. 119. Tuesday, July 17, 1711. By Addison. Page 93. The Women in many parts are still trying to vie with each other in the Height of their Head-dresses. This, at the date of the present paper, was being decidedly 'behind the fashion for in 1711 the mode changed. Still the provincials had their excuses, for in No. 98, the Spectator affirms that there is no such variable thing in nature as a lady's head-dress: Within my own Memory I have known it rise and fall above thirty Degrees. About ten years ago it shot up to a very great height, insomuch that the female part of our species were much taller than men. The women were of such an enormous stature that we appeared as Grasshoppers before them. At present the whole sex is in a manner dwarfed and shrunk into a Race of Beauties that seems almost another species. I remember several ladies, who were once very near seven foot high, that at present want some inches of five: how they came to be thus curtailed I cannot learn.'

Besides the numerous papers devoted to women's attire, the whole of No. 265 is a satire on the single subject of head-dresses. This frequent recurrence to the small absurdities of female fashion is said to have damaged the prosperity of the Spectator. Soon after the appearance of the above