The "stiffness and cruelty of such a course are too much in keeping with the character of the king, who turned into a desert the whole district between the Humber and the Tees. The forest was perfectly suited by site and soil for William's purpose, and it is difficult to doubt that in its afforestation hardships were inflicted, which were remembered long after the general hatred of the Normans had died away.

But it must not be forgotten that though the rigours of the forest laws as a means of preserving game relaxed, the protection given by them to the woods was never withdrawn, and it is to them that we owe the preservation of the ancient timber until the present day. When laxly administered, as in the days of Charles I. and the Commonwealth, the woods have been invariably destroyed; when enforced, as by James I. and later in the days of William III. the trees have increased, and descended to us as one of the finest national inheritances. The

present management of the forest, under an act act passed in 1877, is based on the principle that all, except some 20,000 acres, inclosed since the year 1700, shall remain open and wild. But in this wild area forest law still runs, and protects the timber from waste and robbery.

In the Verderers' Hall at Lyndhurst the survivals of forest law and forest customs appear by the dumb witness of fixed engines of justice as primitive as the oaks of Brockenhurst. One end of the bare old chamber is fitted up as a court, in which offenders against the custom of the forest, wood and fern stealers, or those who have transgressed the limits within which cattle may be kept, or other liberties of the forest, are presented by the "agisters," who play the part of the knights from the hundreds, and townsmen from the township, who "presented" criminals in the shire moots. "Presented," the offender certainly is; for he is exposed to the public view in the most primitive dock existing in England. The prisoner sits on a kind of perch, to which he climbs by a step. Behind this is a square back with cross-pieces of black oak, with the rough axe marks still showing, and immediately in front, beyond the narrow interval of the clerk's table is the full bench of verderers. Assuming, as is probable, that this is a copy of the most ancient arrangement of such courts, we can imagine how some trembling wretch, with the

prospect of maiming or blinding before him, must have felt before the scowl of the forest rangers of Norman or Angevin kings, on this seat of justice over against him. Besides the rude accommodation for judges and prisoners, the court contains a recess filled with books on forest law which, by that grace of congruity which seems inseparable from everything in this strangely perfect region, are screened by the most appropriate curtain that could be devised, the skin of a red deer. The walls are decorated by horns of deer, red and fallow. Whatever the history of the great stirrup, which hangs upon the wall, and is said to have belonged to William Rufus, it is a notable relic, and thoroughly in place in this hall of woodland justice. It is clearly the stirrup in which the thickly-mailed feet of the days of plate armour, with their broad iron toes were thrust, thick enough and broad enough to give << support for the most ponderous horseman in his coat of steel; and so wide, that the legend that all dogs which could not be passed through it were considered possible enemies to game, and therefore maimed does not seem improbable, except in regard to dates.

Lyndhurst is by size and position the true capital of the forest. There stands the ancient Queen's House, to which the Verderers' Hall is attached, and in which the Deputy-Surveyor of the Forest has his residence, and on the high mound of natural verdure in the centre of the town, the soaring spire of its church shoots up, and dominates the immense tract of woodland, of which it forms the natural centre.

The town has no mean outskirts, or squalid surroundings. The woodlands run up to its old houses like a sea; and the parks surrounding the fine mansions, which fringe the forest capital, are mere incidents in its scenery, lost and absorbed in the wild woods around them. Cuffnalls Park, a grassy hill clothed with oaks and beeches, lies just outside the town, and leads the eye by an easy transition, from the formal gardens of the Lyndhurst houses, to the uncovenanted graces of the natural forest. Beyond the park the road divides to Burley and Christchurch on the left, to Ringwood on the right, and at the parting of the the forest at once and without reserve flings itself across the field of sight. Thence to Mark Ash, the most renowned of all the ancient woods, the way lies through scenes in an ascending scale of beauty which mark this as the first path to be trodden by the pilgrim and stranger.

ways,

The understanding needs time to eddy round the crowding forms that claim its homage. It is the Eleusinian Way, along which the genius of the forest seems to lead the neophyte gently by the hand, saying, "Look on this, and that, and that, first grasp the lesser, then the greater mysteries, until with eyes and understanding opened you may enter and enjoy the earthly paradise of perfect beauty which lies beyond."

Thus the mind keeps its sense of proportion, and the excitement and

stimulus of this appeal to the sense of admiration is maintained, as the appetite grows with the beauty which feeds it. Slow and lingering should be the tread, silent and solitary the traveller, in a first journey to the high places of the forest, assured that, though the first steps are through the scenes of laughing rustic prettiness, by lawns and groves, the playgrounds of the forest children, and pastures of the forest cattle, ground that in other times would have been sacred to Faunus and Pan, and all their merry crew, he will at last pass beyond the ways of men, and find himself face to face with masterpieces of Nature's hand, before which he must stand silent and amazed.

From Cuffnalls Park two winding roads lead up the steep ascent on either hand. In the space between, sloping gently upwards towards the light is neither field nor fence, but against the sky-line is ranged a crescent of oaks and beeches, fronted by most ancient thorns. Three shapes, three colours distinguish tree from tree, through their centre a green glade winds up into the wood, and from their feet a smooth lawn of turf flows gently down into the point at which the roads divide, watched on either hand by a sentinel oak.

"Swan Green" is the name of this beautiful lawn. Beyond its slope lies the village of Emery Down, after which the signs and 'sounds of human habitation disappear with a suddenness almost startling. The road lies through rolling tracts of the most wild and ancient forest land. Right and left the slopes are clothed with trees in the prime and vigour of their age. Some few are oaks; but the beech is the indigenous, or perhaps the growing tree of this stately tract of forest, and from this point onwards the mind is incessantly invited to consider the manifold beauties of form which even one species of forest tree presents.

There seems no limit to the hall of columns which fades away into dim distance in the wood, though the space between the stem is clear and open. The gray trunks shoot straight upwards to the sky each with its smooth surrounding lawn. The tallest beeches which spring on the slope of the hill-sides seem to draw back with a certain reticence from the broad pathways of the glades, drooping their branches downward and wrapping them round their feet with a dainty and almost feminine dignity and reserve. Others grow like oaks, flinging their branches abroad in wild disordered tangles.

years

There are those among them which have already passed their prime, and yet scarcely show the symptoms of decay. In many beeches the first of decline add dignity to their forms. The tree dies from the top; but at first this appears only by a cessation of upward growth. The branches at the summit thicken, cluster, and multiply, like the antlers on an old stag's horns, giving to the whole massive and weighty proportions in strange contrast to the usual graceful and feathery outlines of its race. In others, further advanced in the stages of decay, the vigour of the lower branches so arrests the eye, that it scarcely travels beyond the mass of leafage, though above and from the centre of the