bilious. This is attributed to the progress of civilization, and to "us youth," the authors who grow sickly ourselves in writing against effeminacy. But with the leave of those who at once complain and are proud of the refinement of the age in which they live, our civilization is not so extreme as we pretend. No state of man has arrived at a proper pitch of civilization in which fair play is not attended to between its intellectual and corporal faculties. I confess, "for my own private eating," I would rather have been a citizen of the age of Elizabeth, my cheeks glowing not only with beef and pudding, but with fresh air and a hundred merry games; but, nevertheless, my content to be a sick author in the nineteenth century "hath a preferment in it." I think, with a modern philosopher, that we must come round again to our gymnastics at last; and, when we do this, having meanwhile got our books and our love of liberty into the bargain, the world will be better off than if London contained the only gallant apprentices going, and the rest of Europe were full of slavery and superstition. Some drawbacks on the health of our ancient citizens must not be forgotten. Their streets were narrow, which ultimately produced a plague; and, in the time of Henry the Eighth, when Erasmus visited England, it appears that the nation who now pride. themselves above all others on the becoming cleanliness of their houses (for Dutch cleanness is dull excess), were, -with humility be it spoken, - one of the filthiest under the sun. I cannot refer to the passage, but I have a vivid recollection of it. He describes our sitting or dining-rooms as incrusted with a mass of dirt and refuse, ill concealed by the rushes strewed over it, and never swept away. A sense of what is due to humanity ultimately increases in every respect with the progress of knowledge; and this is what makes me hope that we shall at last find out the secret of being both healthy and wise. When Erasmus was in England he lodged in Austin Friars. Austin Friars, I love thee: and yet it is not for this. Still less is it for St. Austin and his brethren; nor yet for thy being so quiet and well-bred a retreat. It is because of the feelings with which I used to turn down thine archway, when a boy, to visit the family of the T.'s. The T.'s, reader, were among the most eminent families in the mercantile world, and remain so still. The princely character of the English merchant, has perhaps, never been carried higher than by some of them. But the charm of a respectable English family is ever to be found indoors. The T.'s never forsook the friends they had known so long, in spite of politics and misfortune. I used to think sometimes that an East India Director, who visited them, looked rather askance at dinner-time upon the stuff of my school coats; but a smile from A. T., or a challenge to a glass of wine from the father, who used to sit (to my equal veneration and terror), panting with asthma, at the head of the table, soon reassured me. As for the stranger, privately speaking, I thought that my Horace and Demosthenes gave me a right to sit at table with any man: and I think so still. To this house, with its music and its kindness, and to another at the other end of the town, where there was a gallery of pictures, I attribute much of the coloring of my after-life, I mean of my ideas and likings. Both had gardens; the latter of a size as well as tranquillity enough to surprise a visitor in London (at least, it cuts an important figure in my memory), and the Drapers' Gardens abutted on it; so that the imagination, in the very midst of the city, reposed on garden upon garden. But the best thing in the house, even better than the matronly grace and kindness of the mistress of it, was a little apartment, one of two or three which the best-hearted girl upon earth had to herself, and to which I used to hasten up with my mother before dinner, when there was no music practising below. There was a small set of bookshelves in it, containing, among other books, the Turkish Spy, a work that used to puzzle me exceedingly, and which, I will be bound for it, was as great a puzzle to A. [I long to mention her name, for it is as feminine and handsome a one as can be conceived, and four syllables long to boot; but I fear to startle the unaffected modesty of the bearer with a more public mention than I can help.] This place was a little sanctuary in my eyes. It was a beautiful sight to see the excellent but care-worn person that brought me with her met affectionately at the door with both outstretched hands of a fine girl of eighteen, and served with all the respect and attention that could have waited on a princess. I wonder how I can write about it with dry eyes. Many years afterwards, when the new generation had grown up, and parted different ways, I had the pleasure of seeing A. once again (now no longer T.), and showing her my eldest born, whom I had named after her family. Time had not taken away her smile. I might have known her, perhaps, still, notwithstanding my politics; and I have a hundred times reproached myself that I did not try. THE The insides of the old abodes of kings. places of What I relate HE more I loiter about my old My antiquities has no pretensions to the notice of the antiquary. He is acquainted with it already. are all out of Pennant, with the exception of what I glean here and there from the wits and poets. The only value of my pictures (if any) is in the coloring, and in the figures occasionally introduced. Charing Cross was so called from one of the affectionate memorials set up by Edward the First, in honor of places at which his wife's body rested on its way to interment at Westminster. The cross here *Thornton Leigh Hunt, the "dear little T. H." of Elia's Witches and Other Night Fears; and the subject of one of Lamb's poems. We hope the reader is familiar with Leigh Hunt's beautiful lines To T. H. L., Six Years Old, during Sickness. - A. T. is Almeria Thornton, of whom and of her family there is considerable additional information in The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt. Ed. - was the last. Its place is now occupied by the statue of Charles the First, an unfitting ornament for a free city. Indeed it can be considered in no other light than that of an insulting rebuke. Nobody is responsible for the insult now, because it has been of long standing; but the spirit that has maintained and allowed it is not favorable to liberty, nor just to the true spirit of the constitution. The constant assumption, on the part of this representative of Charles the First, of a right to beard it thus ostentatiously among the people, and look in a triumphant manner towards Whitehall, has its effect, even in stone and brass. The forms of encroachment make way for the substance. These are the helps to the gradual introduction of soldiers, that are now suffered to stand sentinel at museums and theatres, certainly in contradiction to the spirit of English liberty. A free people ought not to be familiarized in this manner with royal dominations and liveries. There is a bust of Charles the First indecently overlooking the avenue to the House of Commons. When the passage was undergoing repairs some years back, the bust was missed by a late minister, and eagerly inquired after. The workmen. satisfied the anxiety of the minister, and all went right. Charles's illegal entrance into the House of Commons, with the intention of seizing the five members (the proceeding which afterwards brought him to the block), rendered his appearance in such a quarter still more insulting. It is true, there are statues in other places, of princes of the house that displaced This bust does not appear to have been put up in Pennant's time. He speaks of it as existing, but not in its present situation. It would be curious to know who put it there. |