same name near Petersham, was a royal gift to Catharine Sedley, mistress of James the Second, and Countess of Dorchester.

This woman had a pension of four thousand pounds a year: she died at Bath, twenty-seven years after the expulsion of her royal and religious protector.

Still pursuing the windings of the stream, we reach Shepperton, a pleasant retired village in Middlesex, distant four and a half miles from Staines, and seventeen from London.

The parish is bounded by Sunbury, Walton, Littleton, and Weybridge. The Saxon etymology signifies the Abiding-place of Shepherds.

A little distance to the west of Walton Bridge, are the celebrated Coway Stakes, which have excited so much controversy among antiquaries; Camden contending that Cæsar crossed the Thames at this point, encamping his army upon St. George's Hill, near Chertsey, where traces of one of those earth-works, popularly called Roman camps, are still distinctly visible. Other distinguished antiquaries, among whom are Daines Barrington, are of opinion that Cæsar never did cross the Thames. Mr. Lysons inclines to their opinion, observing, "that it appears much more probable that these stakes, supposed to have been placed in the bed of the river to oppose the advance of the Romans, are neither more nor less than the remains of a fishing weir."

The parish church, dedicated to St. Nicholas, consists of a chancel, nave, and two transepts, with, at the west end, a small square tower, embattled. The Reverend Lewis Atterbury, brother of the celebrated bishop of Rochester, rector of the parish, rebuilt the church, chiefly at his own expense, in 1710. There are no monuments in the church of any general interest.

In the churchyard are the following singular inscriptions in Latin, now much effaced, of which a translation may be acceptable to some of our readers :

"Here, in a foreign land, quietly repose the bones of Benjamin Blake; scatter a little earth upon his grave, thou who hast nothing else to do, and if a tear steals adown thy cheek be not ashamed of it; for below reposes a servant than Davus quicker, than Sancho himself more humorous, than Argus more watchful.

"From the island of Columbo, voyaging across the pathless ocean, he followed his master to these shores, where, unlike most men, he found only

change of soil and climate; preserving here, as elsewhere, the same honest principles, the same devoted attachment to his master, the same prompt obedience. Go to Mauritania, reader, learn duty of an Ethiop, and know that virtue inhabiteth skins of other colours than thine own."

"Not far from the remains of her husband, whom she tenderly loved, his partner Cotto Blake, from the same far-distant land carried into Britain, and serving the same master, desired her ashes to repose.

"Skilled was she in the arts in which Pallas was skilful, and more ingenious than the ingenious Arachne; whether plying deftly the needle or the shears, you could have sworn that her ready fingers had been guided by Minerva. Her husband taken prematurely from her side, she languished until a charitable fever soon after consigned her to his grave.

"To the honest memory of this faithful pair, Sir Patrick Blake, of Langham, in the county of Suffolk, Baronet, a friend to virtue, wheresoever or in whomsoever he may find it, raised this memorial."

At Shepperton lived William Grocyn, vicar of the parish, the correspondent

and friend of Erasmus, who is said to have resided here, for a time, before removing to the hospitable mansion of his generous patron, Sir Thomas More.

GG

Shepperton is one of the favourite resorts of London anglers; the deeps are proverbial among the "gentle craft" for piscatorial triumphs; in truth, the quantities of the finny tribe said to have been captured in Hadley's-hole, where our brother anglers now appear busily engaged, surpass all bounds of calculation.

From Shepperton, by land or water, we are easily enabled to gain

CHERTSEY,

a market town in Surrey, twenty miles south-south-west from London. The parish is situated on the south-western side of the river Thames, and is bounded to the north by this river and Egham; by the same river and Weybridge parish on the east; by Chobham and Byfleet on the south; and by Thorpe and Chobham on the west. The country immediately adjoining the river is low and level, and is protected from inundations by an artificial mound or causeway, extending from Egham to Staines.

The town consists principally of two long and tolerably wide streets, intersecting at right angles; the houses, many of which are excellent, are chiefly of brick.

The manor of Chertsey was originally part and parcel of the endowment of the monastery; at the dissolution, in 1536, of the conventual establishments, the manor was seized by the Crown, and retained until a recent period, as part of the crown lands.

King James the First settled it on his eldest son, Prince Harry, and after his death granted it in trust, to Sir Francis Bacon and others, with other estates, for a term of ninety-nine years, for the use and benefit of his second son Charles, then Prince of Wales. Charles, soon after he succeeded to the crown, becoming distressed for money, it was proposed to the copyholders of this manor, that for the present payment of a given sum, their fines should be made certain, and they should be exempted in future from the payment of heriots.

Charles the Second settled this manor on his queen, Catherine of Braganza, who granted a lease of it to John Sayer, her Vice Chamberlain. The lease was for many years vested in the Bridgewater family, and the late Duke of Bridgewater enjoyed a lease of the manors of Chertsey and Hardwick, with the site of the same, and the demesne lands, for thirty-one years, expiring in 1810.

The late Duke of York was the last tenant under the Crown; the manor, after the death of His Royal Highness, being disposed of with other lands of the Crown.

The Abbey of Chertsey is supposed to have been founded at a very remote period; shortly after the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity. In the latter part of the ninth century, the kingdom being repeatedly invaded and devastated by the Danes, the convents in general were plundered and destroyed, and the abbey of Chertsey suffered in the common ruin. The abbot, a priest, and all the monks, ninety in number, were slaughtered; the church and conventual buildings were burnt, and the surrounding territory laid waste. In the reign of Edgar the monastery was again restored, and continued to increase in wealth and importance until the dissolution.

The superior of the monastery was one of the mitred abbots, and was also a temporal baron; from the nature of the tenure of his lands, the abbot was required to provide the services of three military knights; in the reign of Edward the Second, the abbot of Chertsey, with other abbots, priors, and bishops, was summoned to attend the king at Berwick-upon-Tweed, by his military tenants and retainers, with horses and arms, in order to an expedition against the Scots.

The abbot enjoyed the right of free warren, and exclusive jurisdiction throughout the hundred, in civil matters; he exercised the powers of sheriff within the hundred, making returns to all writs: there was also a coroner for the hundred, with exclusive jurisdiction.

Here, during the abbacy of John May, in 1471, the body of the unfortunate King Henry the Sixth

Poor key-cold figure of a holy king,
Pale ashes of the House of Lancaster,

was brought for interment; having been removed from Tower the morning after his death, and carried through the streets of the city to Blackfriars. There the body, according to Stow, barefaced and without a coffin, was put on board a boat, and rowed up the river to Chertsey Abbey, and there consigned to mother earth; not as Grafton says, "without priest or clerk, torch or taper, singing or saying," since an ancient record, or Issue Roll, of the eleventh year of Edward the Fourth, mentions sundry items of expenditure at the funeral of Henry, among which appear twenty shillings each, disbursed to the Carmelite Brethren, the Augustine Friars, the Friars Minors,

and the Friars Preachers, for obsequies and masses on the day of the burial of the king. In the second year of his reign, the body was disinterred, and removed to Windsor, by Richard the Third, in the second year of his reign.

The destruction of the material remains of this princely monastery seems to have been completed soon after its suppression. Aubrey says, nearly two centuries ago:-"Of this great abbey, scarce anything of the old building remains, except the out-walls above it; out of the ruins is built a fair house which is now in the possession of Sir Nicholas Carew, Master of the Buckhounds. The town is very low, and the streets are all raised by the ruins of the Abbey.”

Dr. Stukely describes, with the enthusiastic regret of an antiquary, the condition of the Abbey, nearly eighty years later, when the work of devastation was complete :

"I went with eager steps to view the Abbey, or rather the site of the Abbey, for so complete a devastation I never saw; so inveterate a rage against even the least appearance of it, as if they meant to defeat even the inherent sanctity of the ground. Of that noble and splendid pile, which took up four acres of ground, and looked like a tower, nothing remains; scarcely a tittle of the outward wall of the precincture.

"The gardener carried me through a court on the right-hand side of the house, where, at the entrance of the kitchen-garden, stood the church of the Abbey, I doubt not splendid enough. The west front and steeple was by the door and outward wall, looking towards the town and entrance of the Abbey. The east end reached up to an artificial mound along the gardenwall. The mount and all the terraces of the pleasure-garden on the back front of the house are entirely made up of the sacred rudera and rubbish of continual devastations.

"Human bones of the abbots, monks, and great personages, who were buried in great numbers in the church and cloisters, which lay on the south side of the church, was spread thick all over the garden, which takes up the whole church and cloisters; so that one may pick up handfuls of bits of bones at a time everywhere among the garden-stuff. Foundations of the religious buildings have been dug up, carved stones, slender pillars of Sussex marble, monumental stones, effigies, crosses, inscriptions, everywhere; even beyond the terraces of the pleasure-garden.

"The domains of the Abbey extend all along upon the side of the river for