lying before me, manuscript (equal to twenty pages of print) written by me this very day; knowing the effects which, in the end, that manuscript must have on these parsons, and the great good that it must do to the nation; reflecting, feeling, seeing, knowing, thus it is that I, in justice to our pious, sincere, brave, and wise forefathers, and in compassion to my suffering countrymen, and to the children of us all, send this little volume forth to the world. A Hampshire Hanger. At Bower I got instructions to go to Hawkley, but accompanied with most earnest advice not to go that way, for that it was impossible to get along. The roads were represented as so bad, the floods so much out, the hills and bogs so dangerous, that really I began to doubt; and if I had not been brought up amongst the clays of the Holt Forest and the bogs of the neighbouring heaths, I should certainly have turned off to my right, to go over Hindhead, great as was my objection to going that way. 'Well, then,' said my friend at Bower, if you will go that way, by G-, you must go down "Hawkley Hanger;" of which he then gave me such a description! But even this I found to fall short of the reality. I inquired simply whether people were in the habit of going down it; and the answer being in the affirmative, on I went through green lanes and bridle-ways till I came to the turnpike road from Petersfield to Winchester, which I crossed, going into a narrow and almost untrodden green lane, on the side of which I found a cottage. Upon my asking the way to Hawkley, the woman at the cottage said, 'Right up the lane, sir: you'll come to a hanger presently: you must take care, sir: you can't ride down: will your horses go alone?' On we trotted up this pretty green lane; and, indeed, we had been coming gently and generally uphill for a good while. The lane was between highish banks and pretty high stuff growing on the banks, so that we could see no distance from us, and could receive not the smallest hint of what was so near at hand. The lane had a little turn towards the end; so that out we came, all in a moment, at the very edge of the hanger! And never in all my life was I so surprised and so delighted! I pulled up my horse, and sat and looked; and it was like looking from the top of a castle down into the sea, except that the valley was land and not water. I looked at my servant, to see what effect this unexpected sight had upon him. His surprise was as great as mine, though he had been bred amongst the North Hampshire hills. Those who had so strenuously dwelt on the dirt and dangers of this route had said not a word about beauties, the matchless beauties of the scenery. These hangers are woods on the sides of very steep hills. The trees and underwood hang, in some sort, to the ground, instead of standing on it. Hence these places are called Hangers. From the summit of that which I had now to descend, I looked down upon the villages of Hawkley, Greatham, Selborne and some others. From the south-east, round, southward, to the northwest, the main valley has cross-valleys running out of it, the hills on the sides of which are very steep, and, in many parts, covered with wood. The hills that form these cross-valleys run out into the main valley, like piers into the sea. Two of these promontories, of great height, are on the west side of the main valley, and were the first objects that struck my sight when I came to the edge of the hanger, which was on the south. The ends of these promontories are nearly perpendicular, and their tops so high in the air that you cannot look at the village below without something like a feeling of apprehension. The leaves are all off, the hop-poles are in stack, the fields have little verdure; but, while the spot is beautiful beyond description even now, I must leave to imagination to suppose what it is when the trees and hangers and hedges are in leaf, the corn waving, the meadows bright, and the hops upon the poles ! From the south-west, round, eastward, to the north, lie the heaths, of which Woolmer Forest makes a part, and these go gradually rising up to Hindhead, the crown of which is to the north-west, leaving the rest of the circle (the part from north to north-west) to be occupied by a continuation of the valley towards Headley, Binstead, Frensham and the Holt Forest. So that even the contrast in the view from the top of the hanger is as great as can possibly be imagined. Men, however, are not to have such beautiful views as this without some trouble. We had had the view; but we had to go down the hanger. We had, indeed, some roads to get along as well as we could afterwards; but we had to get down the hanger first. The horses took the lead, and crept partly down upon their feet and partly upon their hocks. It was extremely slippery too; for the soil is a sort of marl, or, as they call it here, maume, or mame, which is when wet very much like grey soap. In such a case it was likely that I should keep in the rear, which I did, and I descended by taking hold of the branches of the underwood, and so letting myself down. When we got to the bottom I bade my man, when he should go back to Uphusband, tell the people there that Ashmansworth Lane is not the worst piece of road in the world. Our worst, however, was not come yet, nor had we by any means seen the most novel sights. After crossing a little field and going through a farmyard, we came into a lane, which was at once road and river. We found a hard bottom, however; and when we got out of the water, we got into a lane with high banks. The banks were quarries of white stone, like Portland-stone, and the bed of the road was of the same stone; and the rains having been heavy for a day or two before, the whole was as clean and as white as the steps of a fund-holder or dead-weight doorway in one of the Squares of the Wen. Here were we, then, going along a stone road with stone banks, and yet the underwood and trees grew well upon the tops of the banks. In the solid stone beneath us there were a horse-track and wheel-tracks, the former about three and the latter about six inches deep. How many many ages it must have taken the horses' feet, the wheels, and the water to wear down this stone so as to form a hollow way! The horses seemed alarmed at their situation; they trod with fear; but they took us along very nicely, and at last got us safe into the indescribable dirt and mire of the road from Hawkley Green to Greatham. Here the bottom of all the land is this solid white stone, and the top is that mame which I have before described. The hop-roots penetrate down into this stone. How deep the stone may be I know not; but when I came to look up at the end of one of the piers, or promontories, mentioned above, I found that it was all of this same stone. A Tavern Dinner. Having laid my plan to sleep at Andover last night, I went with two Farnham friends, Messrs Knowles and West, to dine at the ordinary at the George Inn, which is kept by one Sutton, a rich old fellow, who wore a round-skirted sleeved fustian waistcoat, with a dirty white apron tied round his middle, and with no coat on; having a look the eagerest and the sharpest that I ever saw in any set of features in my whole life-time; having an air of authority and of mastership which, to a stranger, as I was, seemed quite incompatible with the meanness of his dress and the vulgarity of his manners: and there being, visible to every beholder, constantly going on in him a pretty even contest between the servility of avarice and the insolence of wealth. A great part of the farmers and other fair-people having gone off home, we found preparations made for dining only about ten people. But after we sat down, and it was seen that we designed to dine, guests came in apace, the preparations were augmented, and as many as could dine came and dined with us. After the dinner was over, the room became fuller and fuller; guests came in from the other inns, where they had been dining, till at last the room became as full as possible in every part, the door being opened, the doorway blocked up, and the stairs leading to the room crammed from bottom to top. In this state of things, Mr Knowles, who was our chairman, gave my health, which, of course, was followed by a speech; and, as the reader will readily suppose, to have an opportunity of making a speech was the main motive for my going to dine at an inn, at any hour, and especially at seven o'clock at night. In this speech I, after descanting on the present devastating ruin, and on those successive acts of the Ministers and the parliament by which such ruin had been produced; after remarking on the shuffling, the tricks, the contrivances from 1797 up to last March, I proceeded to offer to the company my reasons for believing that no attempt would be made to relieve the farmers and others, by putting out the paper-money again, as in 1822, or by a bank-restriction. Just as I was stating these my reasons, on a prospective matter of such deep interest to my hearers, amongst whom were land-owners, land-renters, cattle and sheep dealers, hop and cheese producers and merchants, and even one, two, or more country bankers; just as I was engaged in stating my reasons for my opinion on a matter of such vital importance to the parties present, who were all listening to me with the greatest attention; just at this time a noise was heard, and a sort of row was taking place in the passage, the cause of which was, upon inquiry, found to be no less a personage than our landlord, our host Sutton, who, it appeared, finding that my speech-making had cut off, or at least suspended, all intercourse between the dining, now become a drinking, room and the bar; who, finding that I had been the cause of a great restriction in the exchange' of our money for his 'neat' 'genuine' commodities downstairs, and being, apparently, an ardent admirer of the 'liberal' system of free trade;' who, finding, in short, or rather supposing, that if my tongue were not stopped from running, his taps would be, had, though an old man, fought, or, at least, forced his way up the thronged stairs and through the passage and doorway, into the room, and was (with what breath the struggle had left him) beginning to bawl out to me, when some one called to him, and told him that he was causing an interruption, to which he answered, that that was what he had come to do! And then he went on to say, in so many words, that my speech injured his sale of liquor ! The disgust and abhorrence which such conduct could not fail to excite produced, at first, a desire to quit the room and the house, and even a proposition to that effect. But, after a minute or so to reflect, the company resolved not to quit the room, but to turn him out of it, who had caused the interruption; and the old fellow, finding himself tackled, saved the labour of shoving, or kicking, him out of the room, by retreating out of the doorway with all the activity of which he was master. After this I proceeded with my speech-making; and, this being ended, the great business of the evening, namely, drinking, smoking, and singing, was about to be proceeded in, by a company who had just closed an arduous and anxious week, who had before them a Sunday morning to sleep in, and whose wives were, for the far greater part, at a convenient distance. An assemblage of circumstances more auspicious to 'free trade' in the 'neat' and 'genuine' has seldom occurred! But, now behold, the old fustian-jacketed fellow, whose head was, I think, powdered, took it into that head not only to lay 'restrictions' upon trade, but to impose an absolute embargo; cut off entirely all supplies whatever from his bar to the room, as long as I remained in that room. A message to this effect from the old fustian man having been, through the waiter, communicated to Mr Knowles, and he having communicated it to the company, I addressed the company in nearly these words: Gentlemen, born and bred, as you know I was, on the borders of this county, and fond, as I am, of bacon, Hampshire hogs have, with me, always been objects of admiration rather than of contempt; but that which has just happened here induces me to observe that this feeling of mine has been confined to hogs of four legs. For my part, I like your company too well to quit it. I have paid this fellow six shillings for the wing of a fowl, a bit of bread, and a pint of small beer. I have a right to sit here; I want no drink, and those who do, being refused it here, have a right to send to other houses for it, and to drink it here.' However, Mammon soon got the upper hand downstairs, all the fondness for 'free trade' returned, and up came the old fustian-jacketed fellow, bringing pipes, tobacco, wine, grog, sling, and seeming to be as pleased as if he had just sprung a mine of gold! Nay, he soon after this came into the room with two gentlemen, who had come to him to ask where I was. He actually came up to me, making me a bow, and, telling me that those gentlemen wished to be introduced to me, he, with a fawning look, laid his hand upon my knee! 'Take away your paw,' said I, and, shaking the gentlemen by the hand, I said, 'I am happy to see you, gentlemen, even though introduced by this fellow.' Things now proceeded without interruption; songs, toasts, and speeches filled up the time, until half-past two o'clock this morning, though in the house of a landlord who receives the sacrament, but who, from his manifestly ardent attachment to the 'liberal principles' of 'free trade,' would, I have no doubt, have suffered us, if we could have found money and throats and stomachs, to sit and sing and talk and drink until two o'clock of a Sunday afternoon instead of two o'clock of a Sunday morning. It was not politics; it was not personal dislike to me; for the fellow knew nothing of me. It was, as I told the company, just this: he looked upon their bodies as so many gutters to drain off the contents of his taps, and upon their purses as so many small heaps from which to take the means of augmenting his great one; and, finding that I had been, no matter how, the cause of suspending this work of 'reciprocity,' he wanted, and no matter how, to restore the reciprocal system to motion. All that I have to add is this: that the next time this old sharp-looking fellow gets six shillings from me for a dinner, he shall, if he choose, cook me, in any manner that he likes, and season me with hand so unsparing as to produce in the feeders thirst unquenchable. Then and Now. After living within a few hundred yards of Westminster Hall, and the Abbey Church, and the Bridge, and looking from my own windows into St James's Park, all other buildings and spots appear mean and insignificant. I went to-day to see the house I formerly occupied. How small! It is always thus: the words large and small are carried about with us in our minds, and we forget real dimensions. The idea, such as it was received, remains during our absence from the object. When I returned to England in 1880, after an absence, from the country parts of it, of sixteen years, the trees, the hedges, even the parks and woods, seemed so small! It made me laugh to hear little gutters that I could jump over called rivers! The Thames was but a creek' ! But when, in about a month after my arrival in London, I went to Farnham, the place of my birth, what was my surprise! Everything was become so pitifully small! I had to cross, in my post-chaise, the long and dreary heath of Bagshot; then, at the end of it, to mount a hill called Hungry Hill; and from that hill I knew that I should look down into the beautiful and fertile vale of Farnham. My heart fluttered with impatience, mixed with a sort of fear, to see all the scenes of my childhood; for I had learned before the death of my father and mother. There is a hill not far from the town, called Crooksbury Hill, which rises up out of a flat in the form of a cone, and is planted wtih Scotch fir-trees. Here I used to take the eggs and young ones of crows and magpies. This hill was a famous object in the neighbourhood. It served as the superlative degree of height. 'As high as Crooksbury Hill' meant, with us, the utmost degree of height. Therefore the first object that my eyes sought was this hill. I could not believe my eyes! Literally speaking, I for a moment thought the famous hill removed, and a little heap put in its stead; for I had seen in New Brunswick a single rock, or hill of solid rock, ten times as big, and four or five times as high! The post-boy going down-hill, and not a bad road, whisked me in a few minutes to the Bush Inn, from the garden of which I could see the prodigious sandhill where I had begun my gardening works. nothing! But now came rushing into my mind all at once my pretty little garden, my little blue smock-frock, my little nailed shoes, my pretty pigeons that I used to feed out of my hands, the last kind words and tears of my gentle and tender-hearted and affectionate mother! I hastened back into the room. If I had looked a moment longer I should have dropped. When I came to reflect, what a change! I looked down at my dress. What a change! What scenes I had gone through! How altered my state! I had dined the day before What a at a secretary of state's in company with Mr Pitt, and had been waited upon by men in gaudy liveries! I had had nobody to assist me in the world. No teachers of any sort. Nobody to shelter me from the consequence of bad, and no one to counsel me to good behaviour. I felt proud. The distinctions of rank, birth, and wealth all became nothing in my eyes; and from that momentless than a month after my arrival in England-I resolved never to bend before them. On Field-sports. Taking it for granted, then, that sportsmen are as good as other folks on the score of humanity, the sports of the field, like everything else done in the fields, tend to produce or preserve health. I prefer them to all other pastime, because they produce early rising; because they have a tendency to lead young men into virtuous habits. It is where men congregate that the vices haunt. A hunter or a shooter may also be a gambler and a drinker; but he is less likely to be fond of the two latter if he be fond of the former. Boys will take to something in the way of pastime; and it is better that they take to that which is innocent, healthy, and manly, than that which is vicious, unhealthy, and effeminate. A new edition of Selections from Cobbett's Political Works, in 6 vols., was issued by his son (2 vols. 1848); and there is a good Life of him by Edward Smith (2 vols. 1878). See also Lord Dalling's Historical Characters (5th ed. 1876). a un Henry James Pye (1745-1813), poetaster and police magistrate, has for more than hundred years been a standing joke-an happy fate he would doubtless have escaped had he not had the fortune to be made poet-laureate ; for the 'poetical Pye,' as Sir Walter called him, was, to quote an editorial note to the Vision of Judgment, eminently respectable in everything but his poetry.' 'That bad eminence' was not, like Satan's, due to merit, nor was it so much owing to his unequalled eminence in badness as to his being raised to official literary eminence in spite of the admitted badness of his poetry. Born in London, he studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, and inherited from his father great estates in Berkshire, and even greater debts. He sat in Parliament for the county from 1784 to 1790, had meanwhile to sell his property, and was glad in 1792 to obtain the post of police magistrate for Westminster, as forty-four years earlier Fielding had been. From his youth he had been ambitious to shine as a poet, and while at Oxford printed a birthday ode to the Prince of Wales. When in 1790 Pitt appointed him laureate, he had published several 'poetical essays' (on Beauty, Amusement, &c.), and poems on Farringdon Hill, The Progress of Refinement, on shooting, and even on ballooning! (Aërophonion) -banal subjects mostly, and all in a hopelessly banal style, though his Six Odes from Pindar were respectable, like his translation of Aristotle's Poetics. Hence the appointment to the laureateship was the signal for an outburst of mirth, scorn, and witticism at the laureate's expense, renewed from time to time on the regular appearance of royal birthday odes and laureate's verses to order. Pye translated from Tyrtæus and the Homeric Hymns; wrote a Carmen Seculare for the year 1800; and in 1801 produced his epic Alfred, deserving by its six books' length to rank as his magnum opus. It is hardly remembered that he was also a playwright, his tragedies of The Siege of Meaux and Adelaide having been produced (with small success) in 1794 and 1800; in A Prior Claim, a comedy, he collaborated with his son-in-law. The Inquisitor, published in 1798, was an adaptation from the German, but was anticipated by Holcroft's rendering of the same original. His Comments on the Commentators of Shakespear commend not too enthusiastically Shakespeare's works, 'the perusal of which, through the course of my life, has been a favourite amusement in my hours of leisure.' Shakespeare is notoriously very careless as to the unities and probabilities; is unequalled in the terrific and sublime, but 'does not possess the power of Otway and many inferior poets of exciting pity.' 'He highly possesses all the sublimity, the variety, the accurate description, and the scenery independent of the representation, of the epopee, both serious and comic united.' He excels in certain of the virtues of the 'ethic poet' and of the lyric poet, but 'sometimes swells his sublime to the bombast, and sometimes sinks his humour to buffoonery.' The chief faults of his commentators arise from a desire to say everything they can say, not only on the passage commented on, but on everything that has been said in the comment;' and Pye thereupon proceeds in 350 pages to add his comments to those of Malone and Steevens, pointing out the obvious superfluity of so many of them. Probably Pye's most popular work was his Summary of the Duties of a Justice of Peace out of Sessions, which, published in 1808, reached a fourth edition in 1827. As laureate, Pye succeeded Warton, held the office twenty-three years, and was himself succeeded by Southey. It was his curious function by hardly interrupted versification to connect the beginning of George III.'s reign and the creative period of the nineteenth century. He represents nobody but himself, and happily he exerted no influence; but when the Pye was opened,' to quote one of the many bad jokes made at his expense -when he began to publish poems, Boswell had not yet discovered Johnson, Goldsmith had not printed any of the books by which his name is known; and when Pye's mill ceased producing, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Scott and Byron, had established their name and fame as representative poets. It was in the fateful year 1801 that Pye produced his magnum opus, a monumental epic on Alfred, his trials and triumphs, of more than four thousand decasyllabic rhyming lines, distributed into six books, and magnificently printed in a splendid quarto. Written in the last years of the eighteenth century for the inauguration of the nineteenth, and issued just when the union with Ireland had come into force, the poem naturally adopted a strongly unionist tone, and indulged in roseate hopes for the newly constituted United Kingdom and empire, which, if not justified by the event exactly as was forecast, have yet been in other respects more than fulfilled. Relying more on creative imagination than even on the most fabulous of the Scottish historians, Pye makes Alfred in his dark days come, a suppliant for help, to Gregory of Scotland; and the issue of Alfred's crowning mercy, the defeat of the Danes at Ethandun, is largely due to the Scottish allies, with whom the poet, still more unhistorically, makes an Irish and a Welsh contingent co-operate. The services in the field of the remaining section of the Celtic fringe are not recognised; but, to atone for this, Pye gives 'a Cornubian bard' an important share in the proceedings of the day. On the arrival, somewhat unexpected, of the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish armies, the English are not a little gratified at these convenient additions to their fighting strength : Wondering, they see upon the aërial brow Alfred fully recognised the importance of having all the peoples of the British islands united against outlandish invaders and foes : My faithful subjects and my brave allies, In the ensuing battle the various contingents be have with equal bravery: Here Caledonia's hardy mountaineers Lift the broad targe, there mark her lowland spears; do their duty on this memorable day. Donald, the Scottish prince, dies gloriously at the hands of the Danish Hubba while in the act of saving Alfred's life. And when the decisive battle of EthandunPye rightly identifies it with Eddington-crushed the foe in the dire blazonry of Danish gore,' and Guthrum had made absolute surrender, then after all was over and much speech-making satisfactorily accomplished, the 'Cornubian Bard'—so that the Saxons and the other Celts might not forget the old British kingdom of Cornwall or West Wales-has a long and important statement to make, winding up with a highly optimistic prophetic vision, which might be regarded as a complete programme of enlightened Unionism plus Imperialism. Even if we date the vision in 1801, rather than in 871, it seems well worth quoting (with Pye's own capitals): Now learn events yet unrevealed that lie As my delighted eyes in yon firm line Waft Friendship's intercourse and Plenty's stores While Concord blesses with celestial smiles THE FAVOURED EMPIRE OF THE BRITISH ISLES. Robert Bloomfield (1766-1823), author of The Farmer's Boy, was born at Honington near Bury St Edmunds. His father, a tailor, died whilst the poet was a child, and at eleven he was placed under his uncle, a farmer. He was too feeble and diminutive for field-labour, and four years later he joined an elder brother in London, to learn the trade of shoemaker; but his country service furnished materials for his Farmer's Boy, and gave reality to his descriptions. But it was in the shoemaker's garret that his poetry first came to the birth; and it was Capell Lofft, the literary lawyer and Suffolk squire, to whom the manuscript was shown after rejection by several London booksellers, who introduced it to the world and befriended the writer in many ways. At this time Bloomfield was thirty-two years of age, and having married in 1790, had three children. The Farmer's Boy (1800) straightway became popular, and was even translated into French and Italian (part of it into Latin also); 26,000 copies went off in less than three years; and the Duke of Grafton settled on its author a shilling a day, and got him a post (1802) in the Seal Office, which he soon resigned. In 1802 Bloomfield published Rural Tales; to these succeeded Wild Flowers (1806), The Banks of the Wye (1811), May-day with the Muses (1822), &c. He made Æolian harps; he engaged in the bookselling business, but was notably unlucky; and latterly, half-blind and irritable almost to madness, he lived at Shefford in Bedfordshire. Christopher North praised The Soldier's Home as no whit inferior to Burns's Soldier's Return; Charles Lamb, on the other hand, tried the Farmer's Boy, but found it unappetising; and later generations have inclined rather to Lamb's than to Christopher's view. The smoothness and correctness, good feeling and good taste, of the peasant-poet's verses are remarkable; fire and fervour, passion and power, are usually lacking; the descriptions, if true to nature, are often tame and tedious. Yet he sometimes has admirable passages, and occasionally noteworthy sentences and phrases, such as: 'If fields are prisons, where is Liberty?' 'And strangers tell of three times skimmed sky-blue;' 'What trouble waits upon a casual frown.' Bloomfield's name will survive as a marvel of self-culture when his poetry is unread and forgotten. Of the following extracts the first two are from the Farmer's Boy, which falls into four parts, one for each of the seasons; the others from May-day with the Muses. The Invocation. O come, blest Spirit! whatsoe'er thou art, Be thou my Muse, and faithful still to me, No deeds of arms my humble lines rehearse; A glorious sight, if glory dwells below, |