revoir, dear old friends! friends of a From St. James's Gazette. houses is intersected in the middle by two shorter ways. This point is the centre of the place. The grey church, with a row of dark-foliaged elms in the roadway near a slip of pleasant green turf, and an old-fashioned inn or two, make up the simple picture. There is no bustle. Here a laborer lounges from his work, or a woman goes her errand to the village post. There is no difficulty in going back for a century here. We almost expect to see one of Miss Austen's heroines walk out in poke bonnet and short-waisted dress. We should not be surprised to No two men differed more in character see Mr. Bennett standing on a doorstep, than Burke and Waller. The former, as contemptuously watching his family dewe all know, was high-minded and coura- part to pay a morning call on Mr. Bingley. with a lofty ideal of political moral- It is like several other towns if such geous, ity and with well-matured political opin- they may be called - which lie in the ions. The latter was essentially a man of parts of Buckinghamshire between Aylesthe world, with no strong political convic-bury and Uxbridge. Such are Amersham tions, and not very eager to stand by such and Chesham and Wendover. Waller as he had. He was timid in character for years represented Amersham; and and a timeserver, but he should not therefore be judged by too strict a standard; for he lived in a time of difficulty for men of moderate views and moderate courage. It is only fair to bear in mind that, before the Long Parliament took the bit between its teeth, Waller made a moderate and an open protest against its ecclesiastical intolerance. His acquiescence in the Protectorate was a certain consequence of the tendency of a moderate-minded and not very energetic man to make the best of existing political conditions. His intimacy with Cromwell was natural; he was a relative; and Waller was far too clever not to appreciate the Protector and to cultivate his personal relationship with him. With these vast dissimilarities in the character and the conduct of these two men, there exists the broad likeness that both were politicians and men of letters, and both men of prominence in the State affairs of their time. It would be ridiculous to compare a statesman and a political philosopher like Burke with an intriguing politician and poet like Waller. But in the minds of many of us they will always be inseparably coupled, in spite of many differences and of the gulf of long years which separates them. The bones of both lie within a stone's throw of each other in the quiet Buckinghamshire town of Beaconsfield. It requires little imagination to picture Beaconsfield as it was in the time of Burke. The houses are very nearly the same; an air of intense quietness still pervades it. A broad street of low white Burke was. member for Lord Verney's borough of Wendover till he took his seat for Bristol in 1774. Such change as there has been at Beaconsfield has tended towards a greater quiet; for coaches do not now rattle through the place with passengers for Oxford and the west, and guards and drivers and stablemen no longer bustle about the Saracen's Head and the Old White Hart. A few steps down the street towards Hedgerley, and we come to the grey, square-towered church. The passenger along this road notices at once a great walnut-tree on the south-east side of the churchyard, not many yards from the street, which overhangs an unsightly tomb enclosed by high iron railings. It is a square erection, with the conventional urn at each corner; an elaborate piece of carving in the form of drapery covers the top, and, as though to keep it secure, a stone pyramid rests upon it. This is the tomb of Edmund Waller: "Edmundi Waller hic jacet id quantum morti ces. sit;" and so on through many words of Latin on each of the four sides of the stone. We are told how he was a poet and a statesman, and when he was born and when he died, and much else - all in a very laudatory style, of course. The stately tree above the grave seems to make this unsightly tomb more commonplace than it would otherwise seem, and the conventional description more uninter esting than such descriptions usually are. So one soon turns away to seek in the church the memorial to Burke. On the south wall a small oval tablet of marble is all that records his grave, as well as that he collected here. The quietness of the of his son and of his brother. Near this place Lies interred All that was mortal of the This is all that is said of this famous man; but it is more telling in its plain simplicity than the tomb of Waller, "with shapeless sculpture decked" and unim. pressive words. The site of Burke's country home may be seen here, though nothing of Gregories is now standing but the stables. As we walk down the road to Penn, and note the distant woodlands and the high table. land on which among pleasant little valleys Beaconsfield stands, we cannot be surprised at the love that Burke bore for his home. Half a mile down the road a common iron gate on the left gives admittance to a pleasant grass field with hedgerows studded with elms and oaks. The roadway across it is still firm and well gravelled, though quite overgrown with herbage, and is doubtless the drive which at one time led to Gregories. At the further end of another meadow are the remains of Burke's home, with a wide prospect of sloping fields broken by wooded hedgerows and masses of timber. But the stables are the only building to be seen. In their best days they were an ugly red-brick structure; now to unsight liness is added the desolation of decay; windows are falling in, ceilings are tumbling down. A little to the south-west seem to be the remains of the house, now no more than grass-covered mounds. The houses of Beaconsfield are seen among the trees; there is a view of fields and of trees towards Hedgerley; while if the atmosphere be clear the outline of the Berkshire hills is visible. The grounds were once surrounded by a haw-haw, whilst a narrow wood full of nettles and shrubs, and noticeable for a fine cedar which doubtless was once an ornament of the grove, marks the shade in which Burke was wont to stroll with the friends spot, with no sound to disturb it save the cooing of a wild pigeon in the branches of the elms, makes more vivid by its contrast the life which once animated the scene. There was not only the bustle of a large household of active rural work, but of the going and coming, the thinking and talking, of the first men of the day. Where we now stroll under the trees or watch the sunlight on the distant woods Johnson used to walk with Burke; here Fox would commune with him, and here would Garrick and Reynolds rest from their work. The form of Burke is so much grander than that of Waller, that when we leave Gregories there is little inclination to walk through the park at Hall Barns (the gates of which are close to Beaconsfield) and see the site of Wal. ler's home. There was a fine house in the days of Charles I.; there is a fine house, built in 1712, now. It was what is called a county mansion then; it is the same now. The family of Waller had owned Hall Barns long before Edmund Waller came into the world; he died a century before Burke, but years after Gregories was burnt and in ruins Hall Barns was still owned by Wallers. Burke dropped by accident, as it were, into this fair English county he bought Gregories in 1769; here he mused and wrote, rested and entertained his friends, watched the political movements of the world, and experimentalized on oats and cattle.. Here he died; the property was sold in 1812, and Beaconsfield knew no more the name of Burke. It is at any time pleasant to spend a leisure hour on these fresh Buckinghamshire uplands, among the rich beech woods and the wild flowers and the copses which clothe the "bottoms." It is well to stay for a short while by the walnuttree which shades the grave of the author of "Go, lovely rose," and to look back to the time of which he was in many ways so thorough a representative. And a walk among Burke's neglected woods, about what was once "a place exceeding pleasant," as he himself described it, will bring a great man nearer to us. THE DEATH OF PROCRIS. POOR jealous Procris in the Cretan wood, Slain by the very hand of love at last! This way was best; the cordial bath of blood, The long love-sickness past. The brown fauns gather round with piteous cries; They mourn her beauty, know not of her woe; They find no Eos graven on those eyes Whence tears no longer flow. Her griefs, her frailties from the flowery turf Exhaled, are like the dews of yesterday; The grim ship hurrying through the Phocian surf, The exile on her way, The cruel goddess, and the twofold test, The breaking heart of hate, the poisoned hours, All these have faded out in utter rest Among the Cretan flowers. Ah! wrap her body in its fluttering lawns! 'Tis Cephalus' own shaft that hath made cease The passion of her breast; hush, foolish fauns, Hush! for her end was peace. EDMUND GOSSE. English Illustrated Magazine. OBSCURITY. IF thou canst wake within one human breast Unseen pours forth its soul, the song is heard TO MY MOTHER. I LEFT thee once in mad desire to find At many a door I knocked and knocked in vain, Craving love's alms which none to grant in clined, But laughing, treated me with cold disdain ; Yet still I wandered, eager in the quest, Forever seeking, and for aye unblest, Since no one gave the boon for which I pined. Then, mother! turning to my home I went AUGUST IN THE KESWICK VALE. Now genial August, July's swarthy child, Comes with the bloom of heather on her check, Rain, cloud, and sun play games of hideand-seek: Old Skiddaw frowns, anon is reconciled. Fresh emerald hues the flowerless meadows streak, And second spring upon the vale has smiled. Sweet second spring! though all the birds are still, Yet have we tender life and flutterings, And innocent new eyes on every spray, With downy breasts that think we mean no ill; And while such glimpse of Eden August brings, We love her better than the tuneful May. Spectator. H. RAWNSLEY. From Blackwood's Magazine. ་ lent parent while yet alive - for Mr. Gurney's occupations, both public and private, A LAUGHING, dancing, flaxen-haired took up so much of his time and atten. girl, fond of every sort of amusement, fond tion, that they, joined to his naturally of admiration, and tell it not in Gath simple and trustful character, prevented of girlish coquetry; pleased to be finely his seeing the dangers to which they were dressed and sent to the opera, to see the exposed. Such, at least, is the face put "prince," and to be seen by him; pleased upon it by his respectful granddaughters, to exhibit her pretty figure in a becoming when obliged to admit that neither advice scarlet riding habit, and be looked at with nor restraint was to be looked for from obvious homage by the young officers him at a time when it was most deeply quartered hard by, as she rode along the needed. For our part, we incline to con. Norfolk lanes; dissipated" by simply sider that the good man must have been hearing their band play in the square; as blind as good men not infrequently are, made giddy, in short, by the veriest trifle who regard their pretty daughters as so that set agog her exuberant youthful many fair young cherubs, incapable of blood, - can this be the picture in the thinking a wrong thought. Doubtless, eye of any one now living, who hears the say they, the boys need looking after; name, honored and revered to all time, but the girls who stay at home, sheltered almost sacred in its traditions, almost from temptation, guarded in by domesticity divine in its associations a talisman and respectability- the daughters who against forms unutterable of cruelty, brighten the whole home life, and sweeten wrong, and crime - the name of Elizabeth | every passing hour, and never need hear Fry? or know of the world's wicked ways, Yet there is not a line of Elizabeth's how can they be harmed by being simply own quaintly serious and most truthfully let alone? What secret desires and perrendered journal, differing as it does complexities can disturb their innocent hearts? pletely from the usual stilted diary of the period (and though more formal and sober towards the end, yet genuine throughout), there is not a page which does not bear out the fact that the Elizabeth Gurney of sixteen or thereabouts was a gay, glad, heedless creature, "mightily" addicted to frolic and fun, and absolutely unrestrained by any authority. Of motherly counsels, indeed, she had still earlier been bereft, since Mrs. Gurney bad died when her "dove-like Betsy" was only twelve; and after that we find that the seven lovely daughters, who "sat all in a row at the Friends' meeting-house at Norwich" (what a sight they must have been !), were left entirely unprotected and uncounselled, to pursue such paths as they chose, and follow their own sweet wills in everything. That they did not run wild altogether, and come to endless grief, moreover, among the lax habits of thought which prevailed at that period, and with which it would appear they were all more or less fascinated, must be attributed mainly to the early principles instilled by their excel Nay, if the truth were out, the feeling really is, they have not the "go" in them to do wrong. Whether or not this was the secret conviction of honest John Gurney, the pleasant, sociable, courteous Quaker, he certainly acted as though it were; and whatever training, religious or otherwise, he bestowed on Joseph John, and the other less notable youths of his family, he let his girls find their own way in and out of the many tortuous paths which opened to them on every side; and the marvel, as we said above, is, that some of the number scrambled out at all. Elizabeth was in her teens just when the French Revolution, with the crowd of lax and licentious writers which clustered round it, had filled the air of France with their noxious fumes of infidelity and lawlessness. All that had hitherto been held in reverence was now turned to ridicule; to cling to forms of any kind was considered bigotry; and even England was so far infected that, in Elizabeth's own words, " to dare to doubt was synonymous with courage." Norwich had not escaped |