demanded, in her turn, how she should be able to see him; and worse still, how he would be able to see her, if we were not in the balcony when he passed.

"Is he not then coming to visit you?' I inquired, in my ignorance, as I surveyed her careful coiffure, her clean dress, and the tale-telling carnation in her bosom.

She looked at me for a moment in perfect astonishment; and then coolly informed me that in Portugal, holding any intercourse with the man whom you were to marry, was a thing unheard of that she had never spoken to her intended husband in her life-but-that he every day sent a carnation to her; which she wore in her bosom each evening at the hour when she expected him to pass the house, as a proof that his attentions were agreeable to her. And she assured me that nothing would offend her so much, as his allowing the weather, be what it might; business, be it never so important; or any occupation, be it as agreeable as heart could wish; to interfere with his punctuality in the performance of this duty. The first time she should resent the neglect by omitting to wear his carnation on the morrow; and the second dereliction from gallantry would infallibly subject him to final and irrevocable dismission.

"At this period of the conversation the Senhor made his appearance-took off his hat as gravely as if he had been passing a funeral, and-walked on! The lady, on her side, bowed and smiled; and then continued calmly to enlighten me on the subject of Portuguese courtship. She informed me, among other equally interesting particulars, that I now knew the reason why she did not comb out her hair, and wash her face when she rose in a morning-for both which indelicate habits I had frequently chidden her-she always put off her ablutions and their concomitant ceremonies until five o'clock, in order that she might look more beautiful when she met the passing glance of her namorado! This was, of course, an unanswerable argument; and having remarked that the lover (!) was a little ill-looking fellow, and decidedly many years younger than herself, I asked her whether she did not feel unhappy at the idea of marrying a man of whom she knew nothing. The reply to this question was as sensible, to the full, as her previous reasoning had been :-she liked the match extremely, for her intended husband was much more wealthy than the person who had married her sister, and she should consequently be enabled

to dress better, and to give larger parties; besides, single women were not allowed to attend the assemblies at Villa Franca, and she was very fond of dancing.

"All this being extremely satisfactory, I had only one more question to ask— how had he ventured to propose for her?' That, also, was easily explained; he was settled in life, and his friends were anxious that he should marry her father having ascertained the fact, and knowing that he had plenty of money, had offered her to his family; which offer, as she had a fortune of four thousand half-crowns, they had joyfully accepted! .

"It is a singular fact, that when, in Portugal, a lady is reputed to have such, or such a fortune, it is perfectly understood that she has not actually that sum in money but, previously to the marriage, a friend is appointed by each family, and these two individuals value the bride's trinkets, clothes, and every article, however trifling, which belongs to her; and the father, when their value is thus ascertained and decided on, makes up the deficiency of her reputed property in specie!"

Ir is better to tread the path of life cheerfully, skipping lightly over the thorns and briars that obstruct your way, than to sit down under every hedge lamenting your hard fate. The thread of a cheerful man's life, spins out much longer than that of a man who is continually sad and desponding. Prudent conduct in the concerns of life is highly necessary-but if distress succeed, dejection and despair will not afford relief. The best thing to be done when evil action; not to sit and suffer, but to rise comes upon us, is not lamentation but and seek the remedy.

MANORIAL ARCHIVES.

BY HORACE GUILFORD.

(For the Parterre).

ROMANCE THE THIRD. THE SOLITARY GRANGE.

The moonshine stealing o'er the scene,
Had blended with the lights of eve;
And she was there, my hope, my joy,
My own dear Genevieve!
She leaned against the armed man,
The statue of the armed knight;
She stood and listened to my harp,
Amid the lingering light.

I played a sad and doleful air,

I sang an old and moving story,-
An old rude song, that fitted well
That ruin wild and hoary.

Coleridge's Dark Ladie.
He is forsworn, if e'er those eyes of yours
Behold another day-break in the East.
But even this night, whose black contagious
breath

Already smokes about the burning crest
Of the old, feeble, and day-wearied sun,-
Even this ill night, your breathing shall expire.
Shakspeare.

I chaunt the honours of old mansions; a worthy theme of chronicle; a rich mine of romance!

That they were monuments of the opulence, the magnificence, and the do

minion of our forefathers-that their reverend frontispieces look on us as it were from beyond

"The deep, backward abysm of time:"

that their principal connexion is with a buried world, and that they hold converse with the living from among the dead, are not considerations to nod and sleep upon, if you be instinct with one spark of that heavenly fire which animates the earthy tenement called flesh and blood.

The exquisite caprice of their architecture-the noble disdain of rule which they exhibit, absolutely startling you by the incessant novelties of their detail, as you peruse them with reverential eye, forms, perhaps, their least charm.

Their main attraction, in my opinion, has been always entirely independent of this circumstance.

I

I could ponder with admiration upon the mailed majesty of a great tower. could hang enamoured on the proportions of a scroll-work gable; the mouldings of a single window would arrest, ay, recall my strict investigation; and by a porch of foliated arch, or oak balustrade work,

I could linger for hours; but these accessories, fascinating in themselves, were not altogether, if at all, necessary to rivet my regard for the antique dwelling.

I have stood before a sulky, unornamented, uninviting house, that glowed through a few squinting lattices, under a nightmare of brooding chimneys, upon a goodfornothing moat half buried in foliage; and should have wondered why the earth cumbered itself with a burden that seemed ready and willing to sink into its bosom-but I knew its annals; had heard them by the winter fireside; had mused on them under the dark hedge of rosewildings in the midsummer meadow, and, comparing them with the lurking, equivocal-looking house itself, exclaimed, "Esto perpetua!" The deed, once done, is never forgotten. The ancient abode thenceforth assumes a mantle, which disguises, perhaps disfigures, but never disparages the pile. If it ceases to be the obscure home of happiness and health, it becomes, at least, the dreadfully famous cenotaph of guilt!

The deed, the deed accursed, is redly engraved upon the door. posts, and the fatal legend," Avoid it! Pass not by it! turn from it; and pass away!" is ominously emblazoned above the gusty windows, darkening the very stones and bricks themselves. The traveller is at once warned and attracted, when at the close of his day's journey, pacing over the glossy turf of the fragrant common, he observes the forlorn mass peering among the foliage in all its paraphernalia of degradation and doom, which not even the golden alchemy of sunset can enliven. And when, at last, it hath rumbled away, stone by stone, from men's eyes, the very trees around take up the tale from the ivy that muffles its ruins; and the winds of heaven waft it abroad to their quarters. Nay, when the last bastion hath disappeared, how eloquent in its irregular modulations is the innocent turf of the tale that is never to die. I cannot forget the effect which the vast palladian fabric of old Elmhurst Hall produced upon my boyish imagination. I saw it once, and only once; and, on that occasion, the nurse told me a horribly circumstantial story of its former master (a Biddulf, I think), who had killed his mistress, a woman of exquisite beauty and rare accomplishments, by pushing her over the banisters of the grand staircase upon the chequered black and white pavement of the Hall below. I have the mansion completely before my

Proverbs of Solomon.

view at this moment; it was one of those architectural marvels in which Inigo Jones contrived to make bulk majestic, and decoration chaste: but, alas! the weeds were flourishing in its iron-palisaded court, its sashes rotting, and its sunblistered door starting from its hinges. An author, among the most powerful, polished, and keen of this romance-writing age, has said, "Some houses have an expression as it were on their outward aspect, that sinks unaccountably into the heart, a dim mysterious eloquence, which dispirits and excites. You say some story must be attached to those walls; some legendary interest of a darker nature ought to be associated with the mute stone and mortar; you feel a mingled awe and curiosity creep over you as you gaze."

How frequently indeed in "Albion's elder day," was the castle or the manorhouse built up, embattled and moated, that within its "guilty 'closure," men might act such deeds as would have made the pavement of the city streets mutiny; or the mountains of the desart topple over their heads!

Much of these ancient deeds of evil have come to light; and the appearance or the remembrance even of the dwelling places they defiled, is terrific. But where are those, the undivulged, the undiscovered, the unseen, save of Omniscience? They have no monument but the Old House. Men have "built them wide houses and large chambers, and cut out windows, and they are ceiled with cedar, and painted with vermilion❞* some four or five hundred years ago, and no chronicles appear of them, more remarkable than those appertaining to their bridal or baptismal festivals; holocausts of oxen, and cisterns of red wine; but I tell you, that if the figures of yon tapestry could articulate, if the dead echoes of those embossed wainscots, and those emblazoned roof-trees could awaken with the words of old, they would furnish matter enough to adorn many a tragic tale, and point many a humiliating moral. In short, making every allowance for my peculiar prejudices, I cannot conceive a much more profitable study for a contemplative mind, than a few hours, spent alone, in some antique residence like Haddon Hall, or Naworth Castle, where everything is left so inviolately sacred to the genius of Ancestry, that you might fancy his stately step had only just marched forth at the gateway, with the feudal train. Nothing so vividly, and so

* Jeremiah.

naturally suggests the trite, but most important reflection, "What is man!"Behold!-the edifice that arose at his command, the furniture his grandeur and his taste accumulated, the tapestry that sheltered him from the wind, the fireplace that enhanced his enjoyments, the windows that gave him to view either the towered arches of his embattled quadrangle, or the meadows and woods, and gardens of his domain; the cedarn bed, whose wrought velvet made a sanctuary for his repose, nay, the very blazon that beamed above his portal and his manteltree, mere emblems of his far descended greatness, all remain, as they have done for ages past, and may do for generations to come;-while He, the learned, the ambitious, the gallant, or the good hath gone down, with his high issue, to the tomb. The worm hath fattened upon his flesh, although the moth hath spared his furniture;—his lofty nobility hath said unto corruption, "Thou art my father!" although the trees he planted have scarcely acquired the midway magnificence of their stateliness and strength; -the tabernacle of his body hath long ago mouldered into dust; but the habitation of his honour, the pillars, the ramparts, the turrets, piled up to his renown, still burnish in the sun, and battle back the tempest, His thoughts have perished, so have his works, or they have been entrusted to treacherous tradition, or embellished by the false colours of conjecture;-but the sacred retirement of the oratory, or the illustrious seclusion of the library, the munificent publicity of the baronial hall, or the pleasant recreations of the alleys and flowerplots in the garden, survive, uneffaced by the transit of centuries, melancholy receptacles of alien footsteps, patient witnesses of the rambler's impertinent prattle, and pensive auxiliaries to the musings of

the romantic moralist.

Certes that master magician, that William Shakspeare, was ushered into the very paradise of domestic romance, when he opened his eyes amidst the Feldon and Arden (the open country, and the woodland) of Warwickshire.

From the towery palace of Earl Guy, with its wonderful Cedars of Lebanon, its musical Avon, and its green court of pine-trees; to the elaborate gables, orna. mented chimney shafts and costly windows of rare workmanship, at Compton Wy: niate; from the rook-haunted manor hall of Bilton, breathing all the luxurious quaintness of old fashioned English homes, to the dreary, ghastly, half-turreted, half

dilapidated Grange of Causton, springing sheer from the middle of a wild green field, as though it had been a tent pitched at random by the patriarchs of old, with that solitary old ash tree, suspending its candelabral branches over the moat, in whose mossy roots and herby bank I have gathered such fine blue violets.This fertile, soft and umbrageous county abounds more in Old Houses, and what is better, in Domestic Traditions, than any of the midland districts I have yet visited.

The villages, particularly those in the Arden or woodland region, are so exquisitely primitive in their situation, architecture, and other characteristics, that you cannot help thinking, such as they are now, they were when the wonderful Will. wrote, i. e. about three hundred years ago! You cannot take a spring afternoon walk, without intruding (you feel it an intrusion) unexpectedly upon one or other of these rural cabinets, shut and locked up in woodland, a perfect miniature of picturesque antiquity. A church, with ivied steeple, and emblazed glass; a hall, distinguished by its superior decorations and bulk, heading a

jumbled, up and down, particoloured retinue of farms, cotes, gardens, and orchards; a little brook, a little bridge, and, leaning against the hollow trunk of a pollard elm, a little blacksmith's forge.

There is not in all England, a town more solemnly invested with the purple and the pall of dead antiquity than the spiry city of Godiva; and, for a baronial ruin, you ought to see Kenilworth by such a twilight, as I beheld last April; those four tall decorated windows of the great hall, and its majestic oriel, what time the gorgeous west painted afresh with peacock colourings, the yawning mullions, and transomes; and a crescent moon glided over a lucid pavement of stars, and a low sweet breeze 'plained through those incredible forests of ivy; and you would deem that Master Shakspeare's panegyrist spake sooth, when he said that he had woven him by the Muses

"A curious robe of sable grave,

brave;

Fresh green, and pleasant yellow, red most And constant blue, rich purple, guiltless white, The lowly russet, and the scarlet bright, Branched and embroidered like the painted Each leaf matched with a flower, and each spring,

string

Of golden wire; each line of silk there run Italian works, whose threads the Sisters spun. And there did sing, or seem to sing, the choice Birds of a foreign note, and various voice;