Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part! Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over, The concluding poem of this paper, although in a very different style, resembles its companions in the one grand quality of being amongst the best, if not the very best, of its class, at once a promise and a performance. That promise has been amply redeemed. A singular honour befell our English Apollo, that of being recited at the foot of the statue (then still in the Louvre), by no less a person than Mrs. Siddons herself. The grace and harmony of the verse are worthy of such a distinction. Heard ye THE BELVIDERE APOLLO. An Oxford Prize Poem. the arrow hurtle in the sky? Heard ye the dragon monster's deathful cry? Proud of his might, yet scornful of the slain, Youth blooms immortal in his beardless face, A god in strength with more than godlike grace; All, all divine,-no struggling muscle glows, Through heaving vein no mantling life-blood flows, But animate with deity alone, In deathless glory lives the breathing stone. Bright kindling with a conqueror's stern delight, Mighty Ephesian! with an eagle's flight Yet on that form, in wild delirious trance, With more than reverence gazed the Maid of France. Slowly she waned, and, cold and senseless grown, Once more she gazed, then feebly smiled and died. It is remarkable that Dean Milman's professional residences have kept close to the great river of England his first curacy at Ealing, his vicarage at Reading, his Oxford professorship, his stall at Westminster, the deanery of St. Paul's. Well there are other ecclesiastical dwellings on the banks of the Thames Rochester, Fulham, Lambeth; who knows! One thing is quite certain, go where he may, he will find respect and welcome, and leave behind him admiration and regret. XII. AUTHORS ASSOCIATED WITH PLACES. VISIT TO UFTON COURT. W. C. BENNETT. FIFTY years ago, our Berkshire valleys abounded in old Catholic houses, to which tradition usually assigned subterranean communication with neighbouring nunneries, in the case of abbeys or priories, of which, so far as I know, none hath ever come to light; or, if the mansions had been secular, secret hiding-places for priests during the religious persecution (sad words to join) of the seventeenth century, especially during the times that preceded and followed Guy Fawkes's unaccomplished crime, and the frightful delusion known by the name of the Popish Plot. That tradition was right enough there, and that the oppressed Catholics did resort to every measure permitted to their weakness, for the purpose of concealing the priests to whom and to their peculiar rites and ceremonies they clung as human nature does cling to that which is unrighteously persecuted, there exists no sort of doubt.-In an old house which my own father took down belonging to that time, a small chamber was discovered, to which there was no entrance except by a trap-door cunningly devised in the oak flooring of a large bedchamber; and similar places of concealment, sometimes behind a panel, sometimes in a chimney, sometimes in the roof, have come to light in other manor-houses. Now they are nearly all levelled with the ground, these picturesque dwellings of our ancestors; the ancestral trees are following fast; and we who love to linger round the grey walls or to ramble amidst the mossy trunks are left to remember and to deplore. One, however, still remains amongst us, thanks to the good taste, the, good feeling, and perhaps a little to the abundant wealth of the present proprietor; and that one is luckily the most interesting of all. I speak of Ufton Court, where Arabella Fermor, the Belinda of "The Rape of the Lock," spent her married life; where she dwelt in honour and repute, receiving in the hereditary mansion of the Perkinses the wits of that Augustan age-Pope, Steele, Arbuthnot, Bolingbroke; where she reared four goodly sons, became a widow, and was finally buried in the little village church. There her monument may still be seen amongst many others of her husband's family, and her name is still shown with laudable pride and interest in that most levelling of books, in whose pages riches and poverty, beauty and deformity, stand side by side the Parish Register. To this old house I rarely fail to conduct such of my visitors as happen to be poets; and that one who deserves that high title accompanied me thither not very long ago will be inferred, I think, by most of those who read the verses that conclude this paper. |