German youth, but pleasant quips and cranks, and scandal about our friends, or romance-romance in which, O mihi præteritos! we then firmly believed. Then to coffee in some pleasant public garden, where the simple German matrons and frauleins, by no means unattractive, with their deep blue eyes, their hands which, instead of "offering early flowers," bore knitting-needles and stocking-wool, and their masses of light hair, moved pleasantly among us. Then for a swim with the stream in the rapid Rhine, and then the abends essen. The supper at the students' Kneipe,-the steaming portion of reh-bok, the häring-salad, the Bairisch bier,-the mighty pipes, the madcap frolics of the Bürschen; and the walk homeward in the mellow moonlight, a mob of fantasticallydressed lads, with their arms round each other's necks, with sweetly-attuned voices,

Marching along, fifty-score strong,

Great-hearted gentlemen, singing this song."

I lay down my pen after writing these words; and, as I contrast the scenes which have risen before me with the enormous respectability of my present life, with all its tax-paying, church-going, and society-fearing associations, I can scarcely believe that such things ever have been. And yet this feeling must be common to us all. The grave shovel-hatted dean, who takes his daughters up to Commemoration, as he hears the shouting on the river's banks, and sees the panting crew pass by, their oars flashing in the evening sun, must recollect when he felt proud of pulling stroke in the Brasenose boat, ay, even prouder than he does now of having written that crushing pamphlet on Essays and Reviews. The middle-aged solicitor, in excellent practice, cannot find it in his heart to be savage with his articled clerk, who drops into Gray's Inn at noon with bleared eyes and a rather shaky hand, when he thinks of himself as the young boy who came up from Gloucestershire, and thought it the height of honour to be introduced by a fellow-clerk to Mr. Rhodes of the Cider Cellars, some twenty years ago. The subtle editor smiles somewhat grimly as he runs his pen through an extra bitterly-turned sarcasm or stinging personality in the manuscript article of the youngest member of his staff, as he remembers how he himself wrote when he first joined the press, ere Time had "worn him into slovenry," or at all events shown him the uselessness of paper-warfare. It is pleasant, however, for me to think that my old associations are easily revivable, that they have been many times renewed, that they will spring again, please Heaven, ere next I make my bow to the readers of Temple Bar. A visit to the Continent has an immediate effect: difficulties, worries, editorial troubles, official anxieties, domestic annoyances-all fall off my back on Dover pier, like Christian's burden, and are left on this side the Channel; and with the white crockery, the black coffee, the Belgian horn-bearing guards, and the quaintly-named Flemish stations, come back lightness of heart, elasticity of spirits, and a rejuvenescence unknown to me on the banks of the Thames.

VOL. III.

D

And this reminds me that for the full enjoyment of Summer Days' holiday it is necessary that the occasions should be rare, and that the gratification should be hardly earned. As you find that regular residents in seaside watering-places scarcely ever bathe in, sail on, or walk by the margin of the sea, so you will remark that the man with a country-house and pleasant grounds in a lovely situation has very little real appreciation of their delights, but, as it were, acts as steward of them for us, his hard-working city-friends. It is his normal state to be surrounded by the loveliness of Nature; he takes it all for granted, and cannot understand the vividness of our enjoyment on coming to it after the close application, the dusty toil, the brick-and-mortar contemplation of eleven months. His nostrils are not sensitive to the exquisite delight of the fresh air, which rushes in when you throw your bedroom-window open early in the morning, and lean out inhaling the thousand sweets of the flowers; he never sits listening by the half-hour together to the murmuring of the brook, the dripping of the mill-wheel, or the rush of the weir; he cannot know the thorough enjoyment of that solemn stillness, that peaceful quiet, which above all is so entrancing to the man in populous city pent, whose ear is accustomed to the rattle of the cabs, the roar of the steamengine, and the hum of the many-footed multitude. There are some persons-notably certain grim Scotchmen who imagine themselves humorists who delight in speaking of some of us as "Cockney writers," and imagine that by the application of the term they have cast an eternal slur upon us; but they are not aware, these silly fellows, that your Cockney has generally the keenest appreciation of those natural beauties from a frequent intercourse with which he is, by circumstances, debarred; and that a primrose by the river's brim is not to him merely a yellow primrose and nothing more, but a very wonderful and beautiful flower, productive of far more admiration in his mind than it is in that of the countryman who passes by scores of primrose-banks every day of his life, and looks upon them as mere weeds and ditch-furniture.

Also, the Continental trip in the Summer Days is a thousand times more enjoyable to the man who has but a certain allotted time for leisure, and who is determined to make the most of it, than for those favoured individuals to describe whom custom has given us that happy word "swells." The mere notion of our trip amuses us for weeks beforehand. We track it out in "Bradshaw" and "Murray," and make arrangements as to where we shall be, and what we shall do, on certain days-arrangements which, it is needless to say, are never carried out. We derive great satisfaction from going to Mr. Stanford's for our passport visas, and from looking back at the passport-book, with its old scrawled and blotted lines. and stamps, and in thinking of the days when those entries were made, and of the companions who were then with us. There is a pleasure, too, in dragging out the old cow-skin knapsack, which has been on so many tramps across your shoulder-blades (but which your servant, regarding it as a "nasty old thing," has stowed away in the lumber-room), and the

Alpenstock, branded all over with well-known names, each recalling a happy excursion, which has been carefully locked away from the predatory onslaughts of your children. Given good health, an equable temper, a knowledge of French and German, a moderately-lined purse, and a stout pair of walking-shoes, and your Continental tour in the Summer Days cannot fail of being a happy one. The "swell" has a courier to arrange his for him, an insolent varlet, talking a smattering of all languages, but a proficient in none; leagued with a universal band of robbers, of which he is the chief. I have often wondered how I should get on with a courier, and I can only fancy one more useless appendage, and that is a valet! What the functions of the latter could be, except to look on while I dressed myself, I never could realise.

There are Summer Days' enjoyments for all, however various their taste. Let those who see nothing to admire in the broad open country, in the glorious sunlight, in the waving seas of yellow corn with farmhouses and barns like islands in their midst, in tossing trees or smiling uplands, or the broad blue expanse of ocean, flecked with white sails, dancing against the horizon,-let such turn aside from the dazzling glare, the "landscape winking in the heat," to the solemn aisles of the old cathedral, and there enjoy themselves after their own fashion. Pleasant to them the dead stillness, broken but by their own echoing footsteps; pleasant the dry pungent smell of passed-away mortality; pleasant the cool shade of the cloisterlike aisles. See the old dinted pavement, from which time and traffic have nearly obliterated the sculptured lines, now glowing in the reflected prismatic colours from yonder window: you will not match those colours easily, for the art of staining glass has degenerated, the secret has died out, and the imitations of modern days are coarse and glaring. Mark the elegant symmetry of each arch, the stalwart well-proportioned strength of each buttress; examine the taste in the carving of each worm-eaten oaken stall; note the quaint ugliness of the old brass eagle forming the lectern. You may admire without fear of heterodoxy: this is the real turtle, the genuine article, not the calves'-heads thickening which the Rev. Chasuble Cope serves up to us at St. Genuflex, nor the spurious imitations of St. Barnabas and Wells Street. In the towns of low-lying Belgium, in classic Antwerp, in Ghent (which is growing rather pretentious, and prefers being called Gand), in dear quaint little Bruges (ah, what pleasant memories have I of the Fleur de Blé! though, unlike Mr. Longfellow, I never heard the "Carillon" while lying there), you, lover of old church-architecture, shall see enough to make you hug yourself with delight. And not alone there: here in our own dear land, in Poets' Corner, within hail of the cabstand and in sight of the senators who represent us, at Canterbury, at York, at Lincoln, at Ely, at Chichester and Salisbury, and one hundred other places, shall you find food for Summer Days' admiration and meditation. And I have one word for you, my brothers in this faith: fear not to be accused of conventionality; but go, do pilgrimage, to the shrine at Stratford-on-Avon. By the birth

house, with its low-roofed rooms, its narrow winding-staircase, its bescribbled walls, its visitors' book, and its general air of show-dom, you shall not be impressed one whit: but go to the church, make acquaintance if you can with the pleasant, genial, warm-hearted vicar (in default, content yourself with the clerk, the best informed and least obtrusive of his class); survey the beautiful building, so elaborate in its simplicity, from all points; and finally, standing in the chancel, roll back the matting from the stones, read the simple and touching inscription writ (who questions it?) by the master-hand, and do fitting reverence to the memory of the sweetest-minded and most God-gifted mortal that ever drew the breath of life. No, not finally; for if there be a moon, and you be a man with as yet spotless lungs, you shall sally forth again at midnight, and, finding the churchyard-gates unlocked, shall proceed up that glorious avenue, where the interlacing trees above hide the sky from you, and so round to the back of the churchyard, where, the fine old pile standing in deep shadow before you, and the silver Avon glancing in the moonlight at your back, you shall feel all the glamour of the association, and deliver yourself up to such thick-coming fancies as shall for the time blot out all worldly connections from your mind, and send you back to your home in a humble, contented, and holy frame of mind.

Here are the slips of paper which I had allotted for my task nearly at an end, and I have not yet entered upon one half of the subjects which I had apportioned to my prosings on Summer Days. Even now come crowding thick and fast upon me memories of pleasant holidays, which must be massed together, not dilated upon in detail. Summer Days at races on breezy downs or sunburnt heaths,-at Epsom or at Ascot,— where one cared little enough for the names, the weights, or the colours of the riders; the "odds," and bets, and handicaps, and general knavery; but, oh, how much for the pleasant smell of the trodden turf, the fresh air, the brilliant sunshine! Summer Days in broad-bottomed punts, with a pretence of fishing ill-sustained; a decided leaning to thorough indolence, and an unremitting attention to the cold fowl and salt in the paper packet, and the iced something in the narrow-mouthed stone-jar. Summer Days on the beach, passed in alternate dips into the old, well-thumbed, green Tennyson, and vacant stares at the blue vault of sky and the blue expanse of sea. Summer Days on the river, with the boat pulled under the over-hanging trees, while we lay lazily in the stern, now looking at a jumping fish, now listening to the rustic sounds borne upon the balmy air from the shore; lay

"With indolent fingers fretting the tide,

And an indolent arm round a darling waist,"

as one of our sweetest Temple-Bar songsters has expressed it. Summer Days on blinding Swiss mountains, in verdant-bordered English lakes, on Mediterranean steamers, where one lies under the wetted awning in that happy state of kief and forgetfulness so grateful to the slave of the pen; under the shadow of the Pyramids, among nestling Rhine villages, amid

ruined abbeys;-on all these I had intended to descant, and all must be now dismissed with only a bare mention of their charms.

Yet a few words before I close my subject. My gossip has as yet been principally upon happy Summer Days; but there must be few among us who cannot count some very dreary ones in his catalogue. Summer Days in a hot, close office, where the sky is only visible between rows of high white walls, which reflect the sun's glare, but not its cheerfulness; where the only sound heard beyond the echo from the pavement is the ticking of the Dutch clock, and the scratching of the quills on the paper: there you sit on the hard stool, waiting for the interview with the lawyer, boiling over with rage against the other client who is keeping him so long, and with a full consciousness that the sniggering clerks penned up in a glazed enclosure are perfectly cognisant of your business,-know how Tomkins is sueing you on your note of hand, or how your wife is getting on with her action for divorce against you, or how little chance you stand of succeeding in your great will-case. Summer Days in a photographer's glass house, with the sun blazing down upon your wretched head,-which head is placed at quarter-of-an-hour intervals in an iron instrument of torture, -with your eyes weakened and blinking, from constantly staring at one indicated spot, with your nose itching madly from the titillating smell of the chemicals, and with loathing in your soul of the art of photography in general and the operator in particular. Summer Days in a sick room; how many of us have experience of these! Who that has ever watched a loved one stretched on the bed of sickness, soon to be the bed of death, but recollects the minutest details of that chamber and that time? The green fields and waving trees seen through the half-opened window, gazing at which yourself, you feel with a sharp pang that they never will again be looked upon by those dear eyes now closed in fitful slumber;-the white window-curtains arranged for the partial exclusion of the light, the little table by the bedside, with the cooling drink, the fruit and the flowers, sent by affectionate friends. Who can forget the eagerness with which, about the hour of the doctor's visit, you waited for the sound of his carriage-wheels, and how, though you knew the Almighty fiat had gone forth, yet you would gaze into his face, and hope against hope for one cheering word of respite?

Shut the book, friend; lay down the pen, scribe; these are matters for private reflection, not for public parade. Our gossip on Summer Days is at an end.

E. Y.