mortal remains beside her friends, in the lovely woodland chapel sacred to her race; and rejoiced that her spirit was now presenting unfettered, at a throne of grace, the prayers which had long faltered on her aged lips, and the praises which had formed the chief solace of her closing ear. It was on Christmas day that her eyes first opened on the world she inhabited so long. It was about Christmas that she bade it adieu; and when the first rays of that hallowed morning beamed on the sweet spot where slept the mother of generations, I fancied they rested with a softer smile on the graves of those whom, "lovely in their lives," death had not long divided!

Such friendships could not fail to be hereditary; and I have long given to the generation that embellishes Dunbarrow a filial place in my heart. Sometimes I dream, like her who is no more; and see in the gay gallant soldier, and gentle soft-eyed maiden, the parents whom they meetly represent. Sometimes I feel like an interloper in a circle which has but a traditional knowledge of my joys and sorrows; but that very circumstance has lent them sacredness, and if kindness, filial kindness, and tender sympathy, can cheer the grey-haired man, they are and have been completely mine.

Under their influence I often enter cheerily into the sober and chastened mirth which best suits the feelings and character of my children at Dunbarrow. They have been early mourners, but not as without hope," and pursue the even tenor of their pious and duteous path, in all the sunshine which Heaven can shed on what is, at best, a pilgrimage.

When sitting around their social and domestic Christmas fire, I often find amusement in the changes which even I have witnessed on the surface of society, and the character of its recreations. When I first knew Dunbarrow, it was, as now, an old-fashioned irregular mansion, capacious as the hearts of its owners, and hospitable as the times they lived in. The hall, with its sculptured ceiling, rich in scriptural and heraldic devices, remains unaltered; and the same grim visages frown over our heads as we demolish Christmas pies of puny modern dimensions. But then, my lady's parlour! It puzzles me to this day to reVOL. XXIII.

member how all the guests who surrounded the ample board, managed to find even standing room within its Lilliputian precincts. And yet it had afforded scope even to the hooped and furbelowed generation which preceded!

They enjoyed it, however, unencumbered by those ponderous pieces of furniture which usurp the dimensions even of our stately drawingrooms. No grand pianos, loaded bookcases, or claw-tables, redolent of lite rature and the arts, adorned the cedar parlour of Dunbarrow ;-the reason was obvious, they were not invented, nor could they, if invented, have get in, nor if got in, could they have stood there. To this day I recognise, with a degree of indignation, in a forlorn and neglected passage, the inlaid cabinet which formed the glory of that sanctum sanctorum; but whose China pagodas, and fairy cups and saucers, have long since gone to swell the store of some antiquarian collector. This cabinet, a fly-table, capable of containing, with management, two bags for knotting, a fire-screen,-whose gigantic and nondescript flowers might have been worshipped as resembling nothing on earth beneath-and some chairs of the same elegant design, whose size and ponderosity chiefly confined them to the wall-formed, as far as I recollect, the only furniture of the apartment; while its stamped leather hangings had contracted, from age and their Eastern origin, a mingled mustiness and perfume, which it gladdened my nostrils to recognise lately in a Burmese letter of compliment.

The first happy evenings I had spent at Dunbarrow were passed in that little parlour; and when, on my return from College, I found that Lady Mary's favourite son had, with difficulty, achieved the erection of the large new drawing-room, I own I entered into the old lady's feelings of regret and dissatisfaction. The room had too, that year, the waste, uncomfortable air of one scarce fully inhabited, and the marriage of Louisa, which was then celebrated, contributed to leave an unfavourable impression on my mind.

Other, and more auspicious weddings, however, had redeemed its character, and ere my mother and I revisited Dunbarrow, the cedar parlour had been transformed into a green

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house of gay exotics; and the old lady, like a stately, transplanted evergreen, sat amid the flowers of a new soil and atmosphere. There was something in the new room very attractive to this rising generation. Its walls were covered with a gay Indian paper, whose birds of gorgeous plumage had called forth the infant wonder, and exercised the opening faculties, of all the rosy tribe. A spacious table groaned with choice prints, and books especially written for childhood, affording a feast of reason very different from the meagre fare which the well-thumbed and solitary picture Bible held out, on high days, and holidays, to our infant optics. Dissected maps were eagerly adjusted by unbreeched geographers-and the awful responsibilities of chess lent premature gravity to warriors and statesmen in embryo.

These intellectual toys have now long since given place to the elegant accomplishments and varied resources of modern youth. The harp of Erin, and the guitar of Spain, blend their tones with lays of many lands; and while the family concert sweetly beguiles the winter evening, I see the playful creature, who, in form, feature, and character, represents the youngest and most fortunate of the graces, stealing the portraits of the whole rapt musicians, and transferring them to paper, with a rapidity which, fifty years ago, would have been ascribed to magic. The theft is discovered-the laugh goes round-and a kiss from the brother, whose martial figure is so prominent in the group, is the punish

ment!

It is always a painful effort that transplants me, on the last day of the expiring year, from Dunbarrow, with its youthful dreams, its tender recollections, and its "sober certainty of waking bliss" to the anarchy and universal suffrage with which a troop of wild and lawless boys and girls are every year gradually overpowering the obsolete despotism of my cousin Jack Thornley's earlier sway. Whoever for the first time hears Jack and his stentorian sons, and shrill-voiced daughters, all talking at once, feels inclined to think that "Chaos is come again," -and certainly concludes them to be all quarrelling; whereas, no family, differing, as they do, on every minor affair of life, can possibly be on better terms on all essential matters.

Jack, a little older than myself, was my comrade at school and college; fought my way through a thousand scrapes in both, and, being one of the best creatures alive, such a friendship as can subsist, independent of one congenial point in our characters, has always been kept up between us. Jack, who was, like myself, a younger brother, owed to the good offices of my mother, the Government situation, which enabled him to rear and support, though in comparative obscurity, the offspring of a marriage of consummate and characteristic imprudence; and now that Jack has succeeded to the family estate, I verily believe he could not enjoy it, if her son did not grace his board much oftener than his recluse habits and quiet disposition render agreeable.

Among the many sacrifices which a man of common good-nature is called upon to make, custom has hardly reconciled me to sit up till past twelve at Thornley, to see in the new year, while the obsequies of the old one are celebrated with a noise which may set at defiance the howl of an Irish wake, or the jabber of a Jew's synagogue. Noise seems here an essential element of happiness, nay even of existenceand the Eolian harps that whisper peace at Dunbarrow, are exchanged for a perpetual peal of alarm bells at Thornley. The contrast, in other respects, is not less sudden and striking. Hospitality at Dunbarrow is rather felt than seen. Meals seem to come and go by magic; and the minor details of life are lost in the harmonious result of the whole. But at Thornley everything is matter of discussion, from the fate of empires to the ingredients of a sauce; and a stranger is often led, erroneously, to feel himself unwelcome, from the debates to which his accommodation and entertainment give rise.

Breakfast passes amid stormy anticipations of the morning's amusement, when project succeeds project like waves in a troubled sea, and the forenoon is half spent before some philosophic stranger pours oil on the waters by his neutral and eagerly adopted suggestions. A party of young people, endowed with health and high spirits, would generally contrive in the end to be happy-but Jack likes every one to be happy in his own way, and by dictating the

mode of felicity, usually throws down the apple of discord. A general revolt against papa's tyranny is succeeded by the splitting of parties before alluded to. Fishing is voted a bore-shooting a nuisance, and coursing barbarous, in proportion as the several pastimes come recommended by parental authority. The out-voted grow sullen, and the victors clamorous-the sisters side with either party, as inclination or partiality promptsand even the passive languid mother, whose existence amid such an element seems miraculous-when referred to as an umpire, adds, by her uninterested verdict, new ardour to the combatants. The young men at length separate, to pursue their joint or separate pastimes; the girls debate about riding or walking till the time for both is past. They walk when they should be dressing-dinner is on the table Jack sits with his watch in his hand fretting the storm bursts, and the first course passes amid a chorus of scolding from papa, and recrimination among the culprits themselves.

There is something wonderfully pacific in a good dinner-and by the time the cloth is removed, all parties are in high good-humour, ready to devise the amusements of the evening. With the help of narrations of the day's sport from the lads, and some twenty times told tales of Jack's youth, I sometimes get the debate adjourned to the drawing-room; and that it does not languish there, a pretty thin partition, and ears too acute for my own happiness, generally convince me, were the clamorous appeals with which our entrance is hailed, ever wanting.

There is, in truth, no great variety of evening resources at Thornley. Few books are to be found except the Sporting Magazine and the last novel -and the piano is chiefly valued as a substitute for the fiddle. Dancing is a nightly expedient to kill time and drown clamour; but who shall play, always gives rise to a brisk contest; and the choice of the dancers is matter of life and death. Cards succeed, to relieve the heels at the expense of the head, and the game, whatever it is, was surely invented at Babel !

Such, without much exaggeration, is a picture of every day's tumultuous existence at Thornley-and yet father and mother, boys and girls, are all

worthy creatures, and would go through fire and water for each other. Much of the evil must be ascribed to the bluster with which Jack, from their infancy, covered his lack of authority; and the utter incapacity of a mother, weak in health and intellect, to restrain the high spirits of a brood of stout urchins, who scrambled as they best might for very short commons and scanty education. pected possession of affluence came too late to afford polish-while it gave sudden scope to a host of ill-regulated desires and incompatible wishes. My young friends at Thornley are like children in a well-furnished toy-shop; they want everything at once, and don't well know what they want-and poor Jack is as bad as any of them.

The unex

His second son, whom, as senior wrangler of the family, he deemed eminently fitted for the bar, will be nothing but a cornet of dragoonswhile his eldest, whom he would gladly inoculate with military ardour, prefers the otium cum dignitate of his paternal mansion. His schemes for his daughters have been equally discomfited, by the youngest and prettiest being married before all her elder sisters-and to whom? A Nabob and a Whig-two characters which Jack holds in nearly equal abhorrence.

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It is impossible not to smile at the mingled emotions which Jack feels when Christmas brings Mrs. — diamonds, her barouche and four, and her Whig husband, to Thornley. How he writhes when the Nabob sends away, untasted, his mother-inlaw's, most elaborate curries, and makes faces at his father's West India Madeira! How the pollution of his breakfast table by the Morning Chronicle turns his toast to wormwood, and the sentiments of his radical son-inlaw his tea into gall! Nay, how the very languor and nonchalance which so often provoked hiin in his own wife, and which Fanny inherits from her, appear, to his jaundiced eyes, the effect of her connexion with the sneering and supercilious Indian !

His sneers and impertinence have always the good effect of putting me in Christian charity with the whole family. They reconcile me to all their good-humoured sparring, and openhearted roughness of deportment. My Toryism becomes ultra, as I support Jack in politics. I beat the bushes

for the boys in the morning, and talk it over with them after dinner; nay, I have danced reels with the girls, and joined their uproarious Commerce table at night-just out of spleen against a man, who thinks it the height of wisdom to do none of them.

But these are not good or pleasing feelings; and I pay for them by the headache which I always carry away from Thornley.

It was this year exchanged for a heart-ache; and my next visit, though one of bridal felicitation, proved one of the deepest calls on my sympathy which it had perhaps ever experienced.

I received, during the course of the autumn, a letter from my only nephew, the son of my elder brother, Arthur, and that dazzling Caroline, the flame of my boyhood, one whose gay facile disposition I formerly mentioned, as having led her to the verge of error, from which she was timely rescued by myself, and a saint now in heaven. Arthur died early in life, in a foreign land, where he had been ordered for his health; and his widow, to whose character foreign manners were congenial, had ever since remained abroad, retaining her only son, on whom she doated, as her inseparable companion. This was, during the life of my mother, one of the most severe and least patiently endured trials. She had no illiberal prejudices, beyond that legitimate and ennobling preference which every native of this free and happy land must feel for its morals and its manners; but the thought of a young man of birth and fortune, thus estranged from every English feeling and association, made her almost unjust to the lands in which he had been brought up an alien, and towards the mother, whose mingled romance and levity had induced her to prefer them.

It had been well if the consequences to poor Philip had been bounded by making him an awkward and dissatisfied Briton-disqualified for the pursuits, and disinclined for the pastimes, of his countrymen. But deeper evils still had nearly sprung from the siren song and witching graces of the south; and those who deprecate foreign connexions for their children, would do well to pause ere they expose their susceptible feelings to fascinations

which it may be alike misery to yield to, or resist.

The young man's letter-the first for many a long year-breathed a very pleasing desire to cultivate the acquaintance of his only near relation; and agreeably surprised me by the information that he was actually in England, on a visit to a nobleman in the north, with whose nephew he had formed an intimacy abroad, and to whose only daughter, a beautiful young woman, with whom he was sure I should be pleased, he was on the point of being united. He was desirous, if possible, to spend a few weeks with his bridal party at our old family seat, to which I have before alluded, in the county in which I was now residing-and ventured to request me to ride over to Westerton, and give directions for such temporary accommodations as the neglected mansion, in its state of long dilapidation, could be made to afford.

My heart warmed, as I read, towards the son of my poor Arthur, whose marriage I hoped would prove, in all respects, a more congenial one-and I found, during autumn, very agreeable employment in fulfiling his request. My first visit, however, to the home of my childhood-for later I had not inhabited it was abundantly trying, from precisely opposite causes to those which often render such visits in after life painful. Many old men complain of the metamorphoses which their home has undergone; and feel as if improvements and embellishments were outrages on its remembered sanctity. Here, nothing had been altered, nothing improved-but the house which I had thought princely, and which even the county histories of the day styled the fine New Palace of Westerton, seemed to stand alone in its neglect and its desolation, while all around bore the smiling marks of rapidly advancing taste and comfort.

It had been let to casual tenants as long as these would submit to its long damp passages, gaping sashes, decaying floors, and scanty furniture-but that time had long been past, and an old gardener alone, a contemporary of its better days, lived in the mansion he still thought unrivalled, sighing over its decay, and the still more complete desolation of those famous terraced

gardens, which, in their pride, he had supposed no faint image of those of Babylon, but which his feeble arm had long proved unable to rescue from becoming, like them, a "howling wilderness."

It was a fine soft autumnal morning when I rode up to the house; shocked by the neglect of the once trim yew hedges and over-grown grass walks which, in my youthful ignorance of better things, I had fancied the very perfection of taste.

The old gardener, aware of my coming, was hobbling about in the sun, before the door, anxious to catch the first glimpse of his mistress's son,-and looked with his crutch (for he was almost a cripple from rheumatism) in too good keeping with all around.

The house was a long straggling mansion, which the vanity of my ancestor had expanded into an imposing length of front, while his finances had proportionally contracted its breadth, so that it consisted of endless files of rooms, following each other in antique state and tarnished finery, like a procession, not over-well appointed, in a country theatre. The small narrow windows were sufficiently numerous to admit light, but too high to afford any prospect to those who might be attracted by the vicinity of the huge antique chimneys, which, grim with the smoke of a century, presented devices unintelligible to modern vertu. Many of the bed-rooms were covered with that sort of faded tapestry, where (as I once remarked, with indescribable awe, to be the case with the objects of nature during an almost total eclipse) trees, skies, men and women, all assume one pallid nondescript tint-like the ghosts of Ossian, scarce distinguishable from the grey clouds on which they floated, or the grey mountains on which these reposed. The ceilings, again, teemed with sparkling gods and goddesses, whose unnatural attitudes and bulky limbs, as viewed by the flickering light of an expiring wood-fire, seemed to threaten a second fall from Olympus -and I remember, even yet, my boyish horror, lest an Icarus, whom no wings save those of a fabulous roc could have supported-should really tumble, and crush me in my bed.

The garden was the very beau idéal of desolation; for, to the not unpic

turesque wildness soon assumed by unrestrained vegetation, was added the far less pleasing ruin of the costly labours of art. Buttresses, whose very ivy looked grey and superannuated, mouldered away from walls, the yawning chasms in which were rendered more unsightly by the cankered branches of the once trimly dressed fruit-trees, partially adhering to them. Flights of steps, so broken as scarce to afford footing, led to lower and lower ranges of less and less cultivated garden-ground; while noseless, nay headless statues, lay prostrate across the path, or stood like mementoes of the taste of forgotten generations.

Last of all, came what was once a blooming orchard, and now a reedy swamp, whose moss-grown stumps barely indicated its former destination. It had boasted, in its centre, of a pond, or lake, as it was ambitiously called, where two miserable-pinioned swans sighed for their native waters-but the chains of both the element and its prisoners had long since been broken, and while the latter had perhaps sought the boundless lakes of Norway, the former had usurped possession of all the adjacent level. I turned hastily from this meanest aspect of desolation, and ran up the broken staircases, delighted to recognize, in the old bowlinggreen above, one curious flower-bed, forming a true lover's knot, which the gardener would have deemed a sacrilege not to keep in its original quaint neatness. He told me it was made by him in honour of my mother's mar. riage, from one of the French King's at Versailles-of the almost equal dilapidation of which seat of royalty, I question whether he had ever heard!

My exertions, and those of the universal genius of the nearest town, whom I took into my councils, succeeded in putting a habitable face on the old premises, many weeks before the gay party found it convenient to take possession; and I began to think the idea had been altogether given up, and to feel, unfit as I was for such society, a degree of natural disappointment, when, late in December, which had not failed this year to come in all its gloom and dreariness, I heard that my nephew and Lady Jane, along with a whole troop of the set he had been living among in the North, were daily expected, They only came a few days before